A Time to Seek
by San Antonio Rose
Summary: Phase 1 of the Stanford Adventure Club's plan to save Sam Winchester involves locking the British Men of Letters out of the bunker and capturing Cuthbert Sinclair's hidden mansion. But with unexpected reunions and stunning revelations waiting for them, the Winchesters may find far more than they thought they were looking for. (AU, gen w/background het)
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This story contains references to, and potentially spoilers for, the first six episodes of SPN Season 1, Season 4's "In the Beginning," Season 5's "My Bloody Valentine" and "Dark Side of the Moon," Season 8's "As Time Goes By," Season 9's "Blade Runners," and Season 10's "The Werther Project," plus lore details revealed as late as Season 12 and some headcanon on my part as to what caused Cuthbert Sinclair's definite turn to the dark side. The title is from Ecclesiastes 3:6 in the English Standard Version; you might be more familiar with Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 from the King James Version as sung by the Byrds in "Turn! Turn! Turn!"

The story is complete in six parts; I plan to post a chapter a day.

Also, I would just like to point out that I established the concept of Zantabraxus being a fae queen in this AU in "Uncle Sam's Misguided Children" and the idea of the Dyne goddess being an actual goddess in "Thicker than Water," both of which I posted last June, long before the lore about Albia and Luheia (and possibly the Dyne goddess) being "immortal god queens" showed up in GG canon. Does that entitle me to Moxana points?

Many thanks to my awesome beta jennytork, who helped with the Latin as much as with the brainstorming, and to hells_half_acre (on LJ) for her invaluable SPN timeline!

* * *

A Time to Seek  
By San Antonio Rose

Chapter 1

 _November 23, 2005  
Lebanon, Kansas_

"Dear Lord," said Henry Winchester, shutting the file folder with a snap.

His grandson Sam looked up from the book he was scouring for information about angel vessels. "What?"

Henry waved the folder a little before setting it on the library table, next to the box marked _Infamati et Obliterati_ in which he'd found it. "Cuthbert's file."

"Cuth—oh, Sinclair?"

Henry nodded. "I suppose knowing what you guys know about his affiliation with the Mongfish family should have been enough of a warning, but... then again, I'm not sure anything would. Maybe all it does is prepare me to believe it's all true."

Sam marked his place with a bookmark and gave Henry his full attention. "What did you find?"

"Well, some of it I already knew about—his suggestions for improving the warding on this bunker, for instance, and the fact that a lot of his proposals after the war were rejected. I knew he wanted to study monster biology in more detail, and I knew he had live specimens in his mansion... but not why. This says he'd been sent to infiltrate the SS and the Thule Society, and evidently he got further into the part than he should have."

"The Thule Society?"

"Pseudoscientific group that gave Hitler and Himmler the pretext they needed to declare Germans the so-called master race and to declare other races, especially Jews, subhuman. They also delved deeply into the occult, experimenting with necromancy and such. That's the group Saturn Heterodyne was involved with, and it looks like Cuthbert picked up some of his ideas. Well, his or Mengele's."

Sam shuddered. "So what was Sinclair doing?"

"Infection. Poisoning. Vivisection. Testing spell effects. Breeding. Cross-breeding."

Sam swore, eyes widening. " _That's_ where Lucifer Mongfish got the idea!"

Henry blinked. "What?"

"I guess it was... fourteen years ago, nearly, when we rescued Tarvek Murphy and his cousin Violetta, he told Gil's dad about another cousin of his named Martellus von Blitzengaard who was breeding werewolves. Turned out, von Blitzengaard was breeding way more than that, and he claimed it was a research project suggested to him by Lucifer Mongfish. But if Mongfish was getting that research from Sinclair, that would explain the scale—I mean, you can't exactly breed thousands of humanoid test subjects in a hidden mansion without someone asking questions about how much food you're buying."

Henry tilted his head a little. "That's a fair point. What happened to the monsters?"

Sam shook his head. "It took _years_ to clean up that mess, and we're still not sure we got all of them. In fact, that's how the Adventure Club got started. Dad sent Dean after what looked like a were but turned out to be a pack of rabid skinwalkers that had escaped from von Blitzengaard's ranch, and Gil, Tarvek, Ardsley, and Colette insisted on going with Dean as backup. And it's a good thing they did, 'cause Gil saved Dean's life."

Henry sighed and shook his head in turn. "I really thought Cuthbert was my friend and that his expulsion was a misunderstanding. But whether he was behind von Blitzengaard's enterprise or not... that's not even the worst of it."

"What could be worse than _that?_ "

"There's a grimoire called the Book of the Damned. Supposedly, it contains the darkest magic known to mankind. But it's in code, and the key to breaking that code is in another codex, which is likewise encrypted. During the war, the Men of Letters came into possession of that codex, and Cuthbert was charged with securing it against use." Henry ran a hand over his mouth. "He codenamed the project 'Werther.'"

"As in the candy?"

"As in the Goethe novel, _The Sorrows of Young Werther_. It's one of the most controversial works to come out of the _Sturm und Drang_ movement. At the end of the book, the protagonist kills himself."

Sam hissed.

"Cuthbert put this codex in a safe in a _civilian house_ and warded it with curses so severe they drove the owners mad. Those poor people either killed each other or killed themselves. The safe itself is secured with a blood lock that opens only when filled with copious quantities of blood. Another Man of Letters bled out attempting to open it, and when the elders confronted Cuthbert, he said only that the man was on the right track."

Sam swore again. "And was that when they expelled him?"

"Indeed." Henry shook his head. "I can't believe I was so wrong about him."

"Hey, after finding out one of my best friends was possessed for almost three years and I never realized it? Trust me, I know how it feels."

"No, Sam, this is worse. At least you know it wasn't really your friend who attacked your girlfriend. This _was_ my friend's doing." Henry paused. "Although I do know how you feel about Brady. Abaddon was possessing one of my best friends when she attacked us. Probably had been for several weeks, since the last case we worked before our final initiation. And I'd never spotted any difference in Josie's behavior at all."

In moments like this, Sam found it exceptionally hard to remember that Henry was his grandfather. Thanks to time travel, Henry was actually just over three years older than Dean, and right now, he looked even younger than that.

"Can I get you anything?" Sam offered. "Beer, whisky?"

Henry shook his head. "No. Thank you. I'll... I'll be all right." He managed a weak smile.

Before Sam could press his offer, Dean and Zeetha came into the library. "Gil just called," Dean announced, waving his phone. "Roads are supposed to get bad tonight, so they figure we should head on up there now."

Sam nodded and closed his book. "Okay."

"And Theo called a few minutes ago," Zeetha added. "Monday was his first day working in ICU—and Brady was moved out to a regular room an hour before Theo came on duty. Then today, Brady checked out AMA."

"What?!" Henry and Sam gasped.

"He was barely conscious on Sunday!" Sam continued.

Dean grimaced. "Yeah, well, apparently Zola found a hole in the security Theo tried to set up for him. They found needle marks in the med port of his IV line and some sort of foreign substance in the line itself, plus residue of a blue powder in his oxygen cannula. Chemical analysis hasn't come back yet."

"Blue powder," Henry murmured. "Cuthbert used to keep a dish of blue powder on one of the end tables in his sitting room. I asked him about it once; he said it was for spells I wasn't ready to learn yet."

Sam huffed. "Yeah, like thrall, probably."

Henry made a face.

"If I had to guess," said Zeetha, "I'd say the stuff she injected in the IV line was some sort of healing potion, but probably one that creates dependence either on it or on the person administering it. That plus a light thrall spell would get Brady on his feet and leave him appearing to make free choices but still keep him completely under her control."

Dean muttered something about Annie Wilkes.

Sam sighed heavily. "He doesn't deserve this."

Dean walked over and put a hand on Sam's shoulder. "Like Tarvek said, if they hadn't used Brady, they'da used someone else. First we gotta stop this thing Azazel's got cookin', whatever the hell it is. Then maybe we can get Brady out 'fore it's too late."

"Yeah. I hope so."

"Still no word from Jess?"

Sam shook his head. While the rest of the Adventure Club had been busy making phone calls and preparing to leave Palo Alto in the wake of demon-Brady's attack on Jess Moore, Sam had written Jess a long letter of apology and explanation and asked Van von Mekkhan to deliver it to her. Van had done so just after the Winchesters had left town, but so far, Jess had neither called nor emailed, not even to say that she never wanted to see Sam again.

Dean rubbed Sam's shoulder a little. "Theo said Sleipnir ran into her at the hospital the other night, took her out for coffee and had a long talk with her, but he didn't know any more than that."

Sam nodded and sighed again. "Thanks. Has Gil heard from Tarvek?"

"Yeah, they got in late last night. Turns out the hunt at Blackwater Ridge was a wendigo. They ganked it just fine. But Dad's not there, never was."

"A wendigo? In _Colorado?_ "

"Search me, dude. At least Tarvek's had some experience with the damn things, thanks to Pastor Jim. Colette almost shot it before he could stop her."

Sam huffed and shook his head. "What the hell, Dad?"

"Yeah, no kiddin'. Gil said they took another hunt in Wisconsin on the way to Blue Earth, but still no sign of Dad, and Pastor Jim hasn't heard from him since he went to Jericho."

"And Ash?"

"Nada."

Sam huffed again.

"I still don't understand," said Henry. "Why would John be hiding from _you?_ "

"If we knew that," Dean replied, grabbing Dad's leather jacket from the chair next to Sam, "we wouldn't be spending Thanksgiving in Beetleburg."

* * *

The four Winchesters still hadn't worked out a completely comfortable seating arrangement for when they were all in the car together, but fortunately, Henry had decided he wanted to spend this two-hour trip quizzing Zeetha about Vietnam and the state of the fae kingdoms in Southeast Asia. So the two of them sat in the back and talked, and Sam sat in the front with Dean and filled him in on what he'd learned about angel vessels so far. There wasn't much that was particularly helpful yet, but the book did confirm that the... capacity, so to speak, was passed down through certain bloodlines and that there were rare instances of vessels who'd never accepted possession nevertheless spontaneously speaking in Enochian, the language of the angels, under the influence of magic. The one named example had been a Winchester whose mother had been a Campbell.

Dean frowned at that. "Wait, so there's somethin' funky on Mom's side of the family, too?"

"That's what it sounds like," Sam confirmed. "The book said there's no record of a Campbell ever having been a vessel, but the researchers thought there might be something else in the Campbell bloodline that... I dunno, strengthens the vessel gene or something. This was, like, late Renaissance; they didn't have the technology back then to investigate it in more detail. In any case, the researchers recommended that the Letters forbid any further marriages between the Winchesters and the Campbells."

"Just for that?"

"Well, that and apparently the Campbells were hunters."

Dean stared at him. "Seriously?"

"At least back then, yeah. I dunno if it was the whole clan, whether they're still hunting, anything like that. Might have been bias against the Scots, too; hard to tell."

Frowning, Dean turned his attention back to the road but drummed on the steering wheel a little as he thought. "Bet that's one reason Hell wanted the Letters shut down before Dad was old enough to join. If he'd stayed in Normal, he never woulda met Mom."

"Unless he went to college at KU, and even then..."

"No guarantee he woulda fallen for her, and if he had..."

"The Letters probably would have tried to stop the marriage. But on the other hand, just killing the Letters wouldn't guarantee anything, either. I mean, I'm not saying it's _not_ a reason, but..."

"Yeah, no, I get it." Dean drummed on the steering wheel again, frowning and chewing on his lip. Then he sighed, shook his head, and apparently stuffed whatever questions and conclusions he had into a different compartment to deal with later. "So. What else?"

Sam suppressed a sigh and rattled off all the general facts he'd learned so far, especially about vessels' physiology. That led to some interesting but not ultimately useful discussion about various injuries and ailments the brothers had had in the past, including the severity of the demon-induced mono and measles that had kept both of them off their feet for extended periods back in high school. They were still about thirty minutes away from Beetleburg when Sam finally got around to what he'd read about the mechanics of possession, most notably the fact that a small portion of the angel's grace was usually left behind in the vessel when the angel departed.

It was a good thing the road ahead was straight, clear, and not yet icy. Dean froze and turned pale.

"... Dean?" Sam prompted. When Dean didn't respond, he tried again. "Dean, what is it?"

"Nothin', Sam," Dean replied so quietly Sam almost didn't hear him.

"No, it's not nothing. C'mon."

Henry shifted in the back seat, but Zeetha quickly asked him something Sam didn't quite catch, drawing his attention away from Dean again.

"What'd we look like?" Dean finally asked.

The question threw Sam. "What?"

"That night. The four of us."

"Uh. I... I don't... b-big. Not like you. But it was only, like, two seconds before you un-merged; I barely even had time to register that you were _there_. And you were backlit, so I didn't... I mean, I couldn't see what color your hair was or anything."

"Did we have wings?"

"I... no. I don't think so. If you did, they didn't register, or maybe they weren't visible."

Dean nodded slowly. "And since then?"

"Nothing like when Gil and Agatha got married. I mean, your eyes aren't... any different."

Dean's shoulders relaxed a little as he let out a tiny silent sigh.

"You think... they left something behind?"

Dean nodded a little. "Not like with Zeetha, but... yeah. I've noticed some stuff. Thought I was imagining things." He took a deep breath. "Gil's listening."

"What?!"

"Think it's stronger with him 'cause he's blood—Zeetha's brother, I mean." Dean paused. "Says Agatha can't really hear anything, just... like, behind a closed door at the far end of the hall."

Sam felt an uncomfortably familiar pang that he was never sure what to call. Sure, he'd wanted out of the family business, wanted to make his own way in the world, have his own friends and his own loves and his own life. But more than ever, he realized he didn't want that to come at the expense of the bond he shared with Dean. While he did love his in-laws... knowing they had a bond of their own with Dean that Sam couldn't share, one that went beyond the ties of friendship and marriage... he felt _left out_ rather than independent. And knowing the four-way merge had happened only because Sam and Jess had been in danger, because Sam had left his guard down long enough for the demon to ward his apartment against his family and they'd had no other way to get to him, didn't help.

"What was it like?" he asked before he could stop himself.

Dean sighed. "Hard to describe; not like I really took the time to think about it. Weird. Full. Different." He paused briefly. "Kinda good, if I'm honest. Not like with just Zeetha... y'know, we were all focused on gettin' past the wards, gettin' to you. It was like we were all in the car, an' I was drivin'. But it felt... I mean... I had half my family right here." He took his right hand off the wheel and put it over his heart. "Like, literally, _right here_. They could help me, and I could protect them." He gave Sam a sidelong look. "Hate that I can't do it with you."

Sam nodded slowly. "Thanks."

Dean reached over to squeeze the back of Sam's neck before putting his hand back on the wheel. And Sam suddenly realized Dean hadn't said a word about the power he had to have felt, being merged with two half-fae and a... whatever the proper term for Agatha was. That was the part Sam had been most curious about all along, if he were honest with himself. But for Dean, evidently, it had been only about the people involved.

Sam wasn't sure he liked what that said about both of them.

"Change of plan," Dean announced suddenly, loudly enough to interrupt Zeetha and Henry. "Just heard from Gil. Gotta swing by the Roadhouse on the way into town."

Zeetha leaned forward. "Has Ash found something?"

"No, not yet. Bobby an' Rufus are there, though, want to meet with Henry 'fore the big get-together tomorrow."

"Oh," said Henry warily. "All right."

Sam frowned. "Wait, Bobby and Rufus are speaking to each other again?"

Dean shrugged. "Guess so."

"Huh. Wow. World must be ending."

" _Dude_ ," Dean objected over Zeetha's half-hearted chuckle and switched on the radio.

The remainder of the drive lasted just long enough for Sam to start second-guessing his own motives about practically everything, but the car slowing down for the turn into the Roadhouse's parking lot brought him out of his reverie. The unpaved lot was empty save for three trucks—belonging respectively to Ellen Harvelle, her daughter Jo, and Rufus Turner—and Bobby Singer's Chevelle, so Dean pulled the Impala up to the free space nearest the door and parked. But all of the things Sam had been brooding over were instantly forgotten when he and Dean looked down at the radio for a moment, looked back out the windshield, and swore at the same time.

Jess was standing barely two inches away from the front bumper, swaying a little and looking totally confused.

" _Jess!_ " Sam cried as he and Dean jumped out of the car at the same time.

Jess gasped and almost dropped the backpack that was slung over her shoulder. "Sam? What... how... where am I?"

"Harvelle's Roadhouse. We're in Beetleburg."

"Nebraska?!"

"You didn't know?"

Jess shook her head. "There was this... this guy... he-he said he could help me, and... then he snapped his fingers, and... and then I was here."

Before Sam could figure out what to say next, the sound of a throat clearing behind him jolted him out of his shock and prompted him to turn around to find Henry looking at him expectantly. "Uh. Right, sorry—Henry, this is m—um, this is Jessica Moore. Jess, my grandfather, Henry Winchester."

"It's nice to finally meet you, Jess," Henry said while Jess blinked at him owlishly. "I've heard a great deal about you from Sam these last few weeks."

"Nice to meet you, too," Jess managed and shook hands with Henry before looking at Sam again. "Grandfather?"

Sam nodded. "Time travel."

Jess laughed a little. "You—that letter—you weren't kidding."

"No. No more secrets. Not after what's happened."

Jess shivered, and Dean said, "Damn cold out here."

"C'mon," Sam said, started to put his arm around Jess' shoulders, then stopped himself because he still wasn't sure of his standing. "L-let's go inside, get some coffee," he added awkwardly.

"Coffee?" Jess echoed. "At a bar?"

"They don't serve drinks this early," Zeetha noted. "And Ellen won't make it Irish unless you ask."

Jess nodded, shivered again, and let Sam usher her inside with the rest of the family following. After another round of introductions and holy water shots, Jo showed Sam and Jess to a booth while Ash brought the coffee.

Once Dean, Zeetha, and Henry were deep in conversation with Ellen, Rufus, and Bobby at the bar, Sam sighed heavily. "Jess, I am _so sorry_."

Jess stared down into her mug. "I ought to be mad," she confessed quietly. "I want to be mad. I mean, I knew... I knew you were hiding something, but..."

"I didn't think you'd believe me. I was afraid I'd lose you if you did. And I didn't... I-I guess I was trying to shield you. I just went about it all wrong. I never drea—uh. Well. I... sorta did dream it, but... I didn't want to believe that my not telling you would put your life in danger."

She sniffled. "That's what those nightmares were, huh? The really bad ones?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

"Why didn't you tell me you were psychic?"

"I didn't know. We're still not sure I am. We don't know what's going on yet. Like I said in the letter, it's... really complicated. We've done some research the last couple of weeks, but so far, we haven't found all the information we need."

She burst into tears. "I didn't want to believe it. I tried to tell myself it was all just a nightmare. But... but you were _gone_ , and Brady was in the hospital and acting all weird whenever he was awake, and Zola won't talk to me, and..."

He reached across the table to cover her hands with his own. "She was using you. Using _us_. I can't believe I didn't see it sooner. Jess, this... this whole thing's my fault. I should have recognized the signs. I'm sorry."

She pulled one hand away and fished a Kleenex out of her purse. "I don't want to forgive you, but... Sam, I _miss_ you. And if... if what Sleipnir says is true..."

"Even if we break up, your life's still in danger. Because of me. Because I still love you."

She nodded and sobbed into her Kleenex.

"Look, I know what happened isn't the sort of thing you can just get over, and I'm not going to ask you to. You've got every right to hate me. If you do want to break up, I totally get it. But even with Gil's plane, I don't think we can get you home before the weather gets bad."

"Wasn't going home," she admitted, still looking at the mug. "I don't know what I was planning. TV dinner and a big bottle of wine, maybe. I just... didn't want to have to face anyone."

"I'm not gonna ask you to stay with us tonight, either, or eat with us tomorrow, not if you don't want to. I mean, you're welcome to, but we can get you a room at the motel, or we can ask Ellen to let you stay here, or we could call Agatha's folks and see if they'll put you up. I'll even ask Dean to buy you that wine."

She sobbed a laugh. "Sam—"

"No, hear me out, please. What I am going to ask you to do is... tomorrow night, or Friday or whenever we end up leaving... come with us. At least until we figure out what's going on and how best to protect you. There's this place in Kansas where we've been staying..."

"The... the Men of Letters place? You said something about it in the letter."

"Yeah. It's this huge underground bunker. You can have your own room; you can avoid me as much as you want. But it's warded super tight, like, from the bottom of the foundation up. Ash can't even get a fix on it with GPS. We've got a line on another place that's even further off the grid, supposed to have even better warding. Once we've got it, the four of us, and probably Gil and Agatha, are planning to move there and let the Adventure Club have the bunker, at least until this thing is over. You can stay with them or come with us. But just... let me do this for you. Let me keep you safe. Please?"

She snuffled into her Kleenex for a moment, swiped at her cheeks, and finally met his eyes with a sigh. "Okay."

Just then, Zeetha came over to the table with the coffee pot. "Dean and I are going on," she informed them quietly. "We'll be back in an hour or so to pick up Henry, if Bobby doesn't bring him over before then. You guys wanna stay, or..."

Jess sniffled and nodded.

"Yeah," Sam agreed. "I can call when we're ready—or... when I'm ready, at least. Jess..."

"I, uh... haven't decided yet," Jess replied. "Where I'm staying, that is."

"Kinda awkward, having Henry with us," Zeetha offered. "He jumped in 1958, and it shows."

That got a smile out of Jess. "Yeah. Thanks, Zeetha."

Zeetha smiled back, set the coffee pot on the table, and left.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Dean still didn't know how Gil and Agatha Wulfenbach had managed to find a seven-bedroom house for sale in Beetleburg _and_ close on it _and_ have it fully furnished and ready for guests in the space of three weeks. Parts of the process weren't nearly as mysterious as others, of course. Even as expensive as California was compared to Nebraska, the Wulfenbachs' combined consulting income had been high enough that they'd barely touched Agatha's trust fund up to now; they'd been able to pay cash for the house, hire movers, and buy what furniture they lacked. But the speed with which the whole thing had come together really made Dean wonder whether whatever power had been trying to split up the Adventure Club since '98 had somehow failed to discern the reason the Wulfenbachs had left Palo Alto now.

If so, Dean thought, that could only be a good thing. The further inside their enemies' OODA loop the Adventure Club could get, the better chance they stood of thwarting the plan for Sam that the demon in Brady had hinted at. Since they still didn't know what that plan might be, however, it didn't pay to get overconfident about anything.

What Agatha hadn't thought she could manage on her own was fixing enough food for the eighteen people they already knew would be there for Thanksgiving: the Wulfenbachs, including Klaus; the Winchesters; Bobby; the rest of the Adventure Club, minus Theo and Sleipnir DuMedd; Pastor Jim and Violetta Murphy; and Adam and Judy Clay, plus their daughter Max and her family. Agatha had Judy and Colette already there to help her, of course, and Ardsley Wooster if he felt like cooking, and she had wanted to stress-bake when she could. Even so, Dean had wound up spending most of the week in the bunker's kitchen with Zeetha, whipping up sides and alternative heat-and-serve options in case there weren't enough leftovers or everyone voted for Thai instead of turkey sandwiches for one meal. During their married life to date, the Winchesters hadn't been settled anywhere long enough for him to take any cooking lessons from her, but with a professional-grade kitchen now at their disposal and nothing much he could do to speed up the research process... he hadn't been able to resist. Plus, it had been time well spent doing fun stuff with his wife to help their sister-in-law, and Sam and Henry had been enthusiastic taste testers, so he'd been happy to make enough food to fill the Impala's trunk.

Now, as he sat warming up the car while he waited for Zeetha to come out, he wondered how much of that skill and inclination had been his own and how much had been bleed-through from Agatha.

Zeetha opened the front passenger door and got in quickly, shut the door, and slid over to the middle of the seat. Dean looked at her for a moment, then kissed her deeply.

 _I love you, too_ , she sent through the merge-link.

 _I'm scared, Zee_ , he confessed without meaning to. _You heard?_

 _Yeah. Yeah, I heard him._

 _I don't even know who I am anymore._

 _Shhh._ She kissed him back. _You're still you, Dean. You're still the man I married. You're still_ _human_ _. We've still got this_ —she tugged a little at the consort bond between their souls— _and you and Sam still have this_ —she plucked gently at the strand of his being she'd always said tied him to his brother, which resonated through him at a strange yet familiar deep register. Then she broke the kiss and backed off just enough to look him in the eye. _Nothing's changed just because you now have merge-bonds with Gil and Agatha as well._

He studied her briefly. _Did you know?_

 _Wasn't sure. I mean, I've had bonds of my own to all of you for so long, I didn't notice a change on my end. Thought there might be some change in your powers, but... it's not like I ever talked with Mom about the possibilities of having an archangel vessel for a consort. Or anything._ She caressed his cheek. _I'm serious, though—nothing's changed in a way that matters. Nothing ever will._

He kissed her again. _Thanks, sweetheart._

They were almost on the brink of merge when Gil interrupted, _Will you stop kissing my sister and get over here?_

Dean and Zeetha both laughed quietly and broke their embrace, though she stayed cuddled against his side all the way across town to the Wulfenbachs' new place.

Agatha was waiting on the front steps when Dean pulled the Impala up the sweeping half-circular front drive. After hugs and general chatter, Dean unlocked the trunk, and Agatha gathered up a load of dishes to take in. Zeetha loaded herself up next, then stepped aside to let Dean get the Crock-Pot, which was full of stew that he'd thrown together just before Gil had called to tell them definitely to come up before nightfall.

Just as Dean reached into the trunk, however, an unfamiliar alto voice with a more noticeable version of Zeetha's accent and unmistakable undercurrents of power said, "Here, let me take that."

Zeetha whirled around and gasped, "MOM?!"

Dean nearly swallowed his teeth. Just meeting his mother-in-law for the first time with no warning would have been terrifying enough. Knowing that said mother-in-law was a fae queen... that was enough to stop his heart for several seconds.

When he finally managed to peel his hands off the Crock-Pot's handles and turn around, Van and Ardsley were collecting Zeetha's load of dishes from a table that hadn't been there thirty seconds earlier, and Zeetha was hugging her mom for dear life. Her mom was easily seven feet tall, had darker skin than Zeetha's, and had hair that would have passed for black had the light not been right to catch its green hue; but her haircut was modern, and her clothes looked like any other American woman's of her physical stature. Dean almost had his feet back under him when Zeetha and her mom exchanged a few quiet words in a language he hadn't yet learned to recognize. Then they both turned toward him, and he found himself staring into the deathless face of a legend he'd never expected to meet.

Zantabraxus, formerly Warrior Queen of Indochina. Zeetha and Gil's mom. Klaus' wife. And Dean's... mother-in-law.

"Mom," Zeetha said in English, "this is Dean."

"Your Majesty," Dean managed without squeaking.

Zantabraxus smiled at him—a genuinely pleased smile that made her eyes almost disappear—and he wondered if maybe there really was a God. "Come, my son, you need not be so formal with me. After all, you are Zeetha's consort and brother in all but blood to Gilgamesh. And truth be told, you might easily have been my son by blood. Your father caught my eye even before Klaus did; had John not already been marked for another, I might have chosen him instead."

Dean didn't blush easily, but that remark made his cheeks flash hot before his brain seized on a key word. "Wait, whoa, what do you mean, _marked?_ "

Zantabraxus looked at Zeetha, who said, "This might be better discussed inside." _I've got my keys_ , she added through the link. _Ardsley can show me where to park._

Dean nodded, as did Zantabraxus, and he followed her inside to a sitting room just off the front hall. She sat down on the couch; he sat down on the loveseat, facing her.

"I think this matter is most easily explained by comparison," she began and held out her hands, cupped as if they were holding something. "Here is an image of your heart."

A ball of light formed over her hands and then morphed into a... well, a hologram, sort of, exactly depicting his physical heart. He could tell because it was beating in time with his own. Intrigued, he leaned forward to examine the image more closely, and she rotated it to show him the right side first. Emblazoned on the right ventricle, like a dark green tattoo, was a winged sword; somehow he knew that was the mark of his union with Zeetha. Above that, on the right atrium, was a blue-green winged trilobite he recognized as Gil and Agatha's mark. That one was shallower, though, more like a stamp. He nodded his understanding.

The consort mark lit up brighter green, like the fae light he'd seen in Zeetha and Gil. "All of these marks are unique to you," Zantabraxus noted, "but remember the consort mark, especially its location."

He nodded again. "Why's it a sword? This one's just wings." He held up his left hand, displaying the black marriage mark under his wedding ring.

"That I can only partly explain. When the choice to love and to wed is freely made on both spouses' part, it is typically only the mortal spouse who bears the marriage mark upon the skin, and the mark itself is typically only the sigil of the other spouse. Gilgamesh and Agatha are unusual in this regard, not least because they chose each other long before becoming conscious of their choice; I cannot explain why, unless perhaps it has to do with the unique nature of the Heterodyne line. In any case, the consort mark upon the heart, which anchors the bond between souls, combines the sigils of both houses. The sword must therefore bear some significance as an identifier of your self."

He blinked and murmured, "The Michael Sword..."

She studied him a moment, then nodded. "Yes, you are of that line. I had not fully recognized it until now."

He ran a hand over his face. "Wow. Okay. So, uh... Zeetha's got one of those, too?"

"Yes, and also the mark of your merging with Gilgamesh and Agatha—you were the vessel, true, but since none of them are pure spirit, their bodies were blended with yours as well. That bond differs in many respects from the consort bond, as is clear from the position and depth of the mark, but all four of you share it. This mark, however, is yours alone." She rotated the image to display the left side of the heart.

And there, gouged knife-deep into the muscle, was a rough _S. W._

" _Sammy_ ," he breathed, unable to keep a fond smile off his face or to stop himself from reaching for the image. His fingers met air—but the brother-bond quivered a little anyway.

She arched one elegant eyebrow. "You knew of this bond?"

He nodded. "Yeah, Gil an' Zee both told me, but... never seen proof before." He paused. "Would these show up on, like, x-rays and stuff?"

"Perhaps not on x-ray, but other forms of imaging, possibly."

"Just wondered why Sun never said anything if he saw that."

She chuckled. "Sun Jen-djieh is of my people, the grandson of one of my handmaidens. He knows when and how to keep secrets."

He blinked several times. "Wow. Okay. Huh."

"Now." The image dissolved into light. "This is your father's heart, as I recall it."

The light re-formed into another heart image, which she rotated to display the right ventricle more clearly. There was a different sigil, much smaller and silver-white, in the position where the consort mark had been on Dean's heart; she enlarged the image and made the sigil light up green to give him a better look at it. The sigil looked sort of like a stylized M, not quite heart-shaped, with a bar across the center point. And the texture, from what he could make out, looked more like a branding scar than the marks he'd seen on his own heart.

"That don't look like two house sigils to me," he finally said aloud.

"You are correct. This mark is Enochian."

He looked up at her sharply.

She dissolved the image and lowered her hands. "Do you know what cupids are?"

"Yes, ma'am. Chubby little kids with wings and bows 'n' arrows, show up on valentine cards."

"That is only a mortal marketing image. In truth, the cupids are the lowest rank of angels, who act only on the orders of their superiors. The 'arrow' they shoot is but a metaphor for the placing of that mark. In most cases, the marks are placed in pairs, forging a bond between two souls that may or may not have already inclined toward each other. Those so marked invariably fall in love with one another."

He felt the blood drain from his face as he caught the implications. A cupid had marked Mom and Dad for each other even before Dad had left Lawrence to join the Marines. That meant the angels had wanted Mom and Dad married—had wanted the Letters out of the way— _had wanted Mom dead_ —

He was on his feet and pacing before he remembered where he was. This wasn't some cheap motel room he could trash; Agatha would have his hide if he broke anything. He jammed his hands into his hair to stop himself. But if he didn't break something, or kill something or hit someone, he might just explode.

The angels Mom had trusted, had _promised_ him were watching over him, they had just stood by and let Azazel kill her, let Azazel put that curse on Sammy—

"Come, my warrior," Zantabraxus said, putting a hand on Dean's shoulder. "Shall we spar?"

He dropped his hands and nodded tightly. She waved her other hand... and suddenly they were in a sweltering jungle somewhere, and he was holding swords like Zeetha's and was... well, not naked, but wearing a lot less clothing than he'd ever expected to wear in front of his mother-in-law. Then again, Zantabraxus wasn't wearing much aside from some mostly-decorative armor, either.

"We cannot hurt each other here," she assured him before the embarrassment could really catch up with him. Then she stepped several paces away and raised her own swords. "You know the forms, do you not?"

He took a deep breath and nodded.

"Come, then. Begin when you are ready."

He took another deep breath—and suddenly the image of the sigil flashed in his mind again, followed by Mom on the ceiling, himself running outside with Sammy while their world burned down, Dad coming home drunk and bloody and crying for Mom, _Jess_ on the ceiling, Henry waking up pale and shaking from the nightmares of Abaddon's slaughter of the Letters—

—and the angels had _let it all happen_ —

He attacked.

This wasn't like his friendly matches with Zeetha, safeguards of whatever pocket dimension they were in notwithstanding. Zantabraxus never made a move he couldn't block, but she didn't pull her blows, and neither did he. He even landed a few hits, although his swords never penetrated her skin; the blade either retracted or turned soft or disappeared altogether, only to return to normal when he pulled the hilt back. He fought with all the force of twenty years of hunter training, fueled by rage and grief, and she gave as good as she got.

He had absolutely no sense of time in this place, but the fight wasn't a short one. Eventually, however, she succeeded in disarming him, which was the first point at which he realized that his strength was flagging. Still caught in the fervor of battle, though, he rushed at her empty-handed... tripped... and suddenly he was on his knees, in her arms, sobbing his eyes out. She rubbed his back and made soothing noises, and he clung to her, that part of him that was forever four years old desperately drinking in a mother's love once more.

When he finally came back to himself, physically spent and emotionally drained, they were back on the couch in Gil and Agatha's sitting room in their regular clothes, and what he could hear of other conversations elsewhere in the house told him that no time had passed at all.

"There, now, my son," Zantabraxus murmured. "Do you feel better?"

He nodded. _Yes, ma'am_ , he meant to say, but what croaked out was, "Thanks, Mom."

Before he could even cringe at the slip, she kissed his forehead gently, and a wave of comforting warmth washed over him. "You fought valiantly, dear prince. My children have chosen well. And yes, you may call me 'Mom' or 'Mother' if you choose, or 'Zanta' if you prefer."

"'Kay. Thanks." Some knot of tension in his chest relaxed and vanished, and he didn't think it was just because she approved of him. She'd never replace Mom, of course; nobody could, even if they looked like Mom, which Zanta didn't. They were totally different in almost every way, and Zanta wasn't even human. Still... there was that inner four-year-old in his beloved _I Wuv Hugz_ T-shirt, crying with relief while the outer twenty-six-year-old was too exhausted to even sit up.

He had a mom again.

After a moment, she handed him a box of Kleenex, and he mustered the energy to wipe his face and blow his nose. Then he took a deep breath and let it out again. "We can't tell Sammy," he whispered hoarsely.

She frowned a little. "Tell him what?"

"About the cupids." He sighed and sat up enough to lean against the back of the couch instead of her shoulder. "How much do you know? About us?"

"My children have told me little. Our sparring match showed me much."

"Sammy still believes—I mean, he still prays and all that jazz. He's having a hard enough time with this whole thing, knowing what we know an'... an' what we can guess. The demon said somethin' about Mom havin' sold 'im, but I can't believe that. At least, not... not at face value. Maybe Mom made some kind of deal to get out of the life, marry Dad, but... there's no way she coulda known, is there?"

"I have not heard of a deal that set the _second_ -born as the price, no. Most demon deals require the deal-maker's soul. It is only the gods and the fae who require a child, and then most often the first-born. Rarely, they take the youngest child, but your mother was too young for any but the Fates and the Most High to know for certain whether Sam was to be the last."

Dean dragged a hand over his face. "I was cool with... with thinkin' God didn't exist, or at least not bein' sure. But if... if the angels set this whole thing up, whatever the hell really happened that night, however the hell Azazel got in the house to put that curse on Sammy and kill Mom... it would kill Sam, knowin' that." He finally met her eyes, silently begging her to understand.

She nodded slowly. "I cannot promise that he will not learn some other way. But I will say nothing to him of this matter."

He heaved a quiet sigh of relief. "Thanks."

She smiled a little and squeezed his hand, and his weariness from sparring fled. "And now I think you are expected in the kitchen, and I have someone else I must meet."

He nodded and stood just as Gil's and Klaus' voices became audible in the hall. Suddenly catching Gil's sense of mischief, Dean went out to meet them and exchanged a few pleasantries with Klaus.

"And in here," Gil said, "we have a surprise for you, Dad."

Eyebrows raised, Klaus turned—and gasped loudly as Zanta stood up from the couch. " _ZANTA?!_ "

" _Nyob zoo_ ,* Klaus," Zanta returned with a grin.

Klaus tried to say something several times, but nothing came out. Finally, he gave up, rushed into the sitting room, and swept her into a passionate kiss.

Gil nudged Dean. _C'mon_ , he sent through the merge-link.

Even as Dean followed Gil further into the house, he heard Klaus murmur, "I thought I'd never see you again..."

"So you and Mom got into it, huh?" Gil asked, drawing Dean's attention away from his in-laws' reunion.

"Yeah, in a good way," Dean replied. "You hear much?"

"Not as much as Zeetha did. Did hear your conversation at the end, though. Good thing I wasn't actually talking to Dad at the time; I'm not sure I'm ready to let him in on that side of things."

Dean nodded. "And?"

Gil sighed. "Sam needs to find out _eventually_ , and it'd be better if it comes from one of us than from a demon. But we all agree—'eventually' isn't today."

"Or tomorrow," they chorused.

"What are you going to tell Henry, though?" Gil continued.

"Aw, hell, hadn't even thought about Henry." Dean blew the air out of his cheeks. "The basics, if he asks. He's smart enough to put the pieces together from there."

Gil nodded. "Mom really likes you, by the way."

Dean blinked. "Huh?"

Gil pointed to the spot on Dean's forehead where Zanta had kissed him. "It's not visible to the human eye, but she's sealed you as a member of her family. Gives you way more protection than even the consort bond does. She did the same thing to Agatha when she first got here."

"Huh. Wow. Awesome." Dean made a mental note to ask her to seal Sam and Henry the same way.

As it turned out, however, he didn't have to. He was still reassuring Zeetha that he was all right when Bobby arrived with Sam and Henry; Jess, they reported, had opted to stay at the motel that night but would call in the morning to let them know for sure whether she was coming for lunch. Agatha took charge of introducing Bobby around while Gil went to get his parents. Klaus' hair looked more rumpled than usual when they came back, which made Zeetha grin, but both Klaus and Zanta were composed enough to greet the newcomers cordially. Zanta only shook hands with Bobby, but she kissed Sam and Henry on the cheek—and Dean caught the barest green flash each time.

 _Yeah_ , Zeetha confirmed at his silent sigh of relief, sliding her arm around his waist. _There's another mark for the greater household; she might give that to Bobby and Jim. I've already seen it on Ardsley and Van, and I think she gave it to Tarvek and Colette, too. But what she gave Sam and Henry was the family mark. It won't be_ as _strong without the consort bond, but... they're your blood, and you're practically our blood._

 _I love you so damn much_ , Dean thought back and kissed her temple.

* * *

.

* * *

* Hello (lit. "live well"—Hmong)


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: Colette's little song is a riff on a moment in GG canon ( _Kings and Wizards_ p. 52) and is not, so far as I know, an actual song.

* * *

Chapter 3

Rufus, the Harvelles, and Ash decided at the last minute to join the extended Adventure Club crew for Thanksgiving dinner, so they plus Zanta and Jess made the gathering an even two dozen, and a fun and lively time was had by all. But Max and her family, by longstanding common consent, were out of the hunting loop, so the real purpose of the gathering—bringing the senior hunters and parents (and Jess, since she was there) up to speed on everything that had happened in the last month—had to wait until after Judy managed to convince Max and Jack to take their boys back to the Clays' house for naps. Jo, Ellen, and Ash left at the same time, both because they needed to start preparing to open the Roadhouse for the evening and because they already had all the info that was about to be shared and still didn't have any news about Dad.

Not ten minutes later, a blizzard hit. Max and Ellen both called to say that they'd made it back to their destinations safely, but Klaus and Adam agreed both that it wouldn't be long before the roads became impassible and that the flying snow was already too dangerous to drive through. And sure enough, by the time the briefing was finished, Rufus declared that they were well and truly snowed in, at least for the night.

That meant everyone was still there the next morning when Zanta approached Sam and said, "May I have your permission to try an experiment, Sam?"

Sam blinked. "What kind of experiment?"

"I have not yet been able to discern precisely what curse was laid on you, but it may be possible to retrieve the information from your memory. If you are willing, I would like to try. If nothing else, it may tell us how Azazel intends to exploit the curse in the future and why he ordered the other demon to attack Jess as he did."

"You can do that?" Sam and Dean chorused.

"I mean, I was six months old, apparently," Sam continued. "Are those memories even still there?"

"You may not have conscious access to them," Zanta conceded, "but the curse itself may have trapped them so that they have not become wholly lost."

"I'd say it's worth a try," Henry chimed in, joining them. "If we can get any clues at _all_ , we can at least start narrowing down the field of possibilities to research when we get back to the bunker."

Sam nodded. "Sure, we can try it. I don't know how easy it'll be to articulate what I remember, though."

"I can charm the television to show the memories as you recall them," Zanta offered. "That may be the easiest option."

Sam looked at Dean, who nodded, and then turned to catch Jess' eye while Dean apparently thought something to Zeetha and Gil. Gil, eyes sparkling with blue and green light as he relayed the message to Agatha, pointed them to the den, and the Winchesters and Wulfenbachs followed Zanta in there with Jess bringing up the rear. While Sam and Dean sat on the couch and everyone else took seats elsewhere around the room—except for Jess, who warily hung back near Zoing's tank—Zanta went over to the TV and chanted something over it. Then she came back, put a hand on top of Sam's head, and chanted something that sounded similar.

"Now," she said when she'd finished, "recall something pleasant."

Sam's first thought was of Jess laughing at something Violetta had said over dinner the day before—the food had been great, and so had the company, but just seeing her alive and happy had been the best of all. A split second later, the TV came on, and the scene played out there in full color and sound, just as he remembered it.

"You _have_ got it bad," Dean teased as a burble Sam had long ago associated with Zoing laughing burst from the tank.

Sam ducked his head but couldn't keep from grinning. "Shut up."

When he looked up, Jess was blushing.

Zanta chuckled. "Very well, let us proceed. Sam, it will be easiest on you if you lie down while I attempt the spell."

Sam nodded. "Okay."

"Need me out of the way?" Dean asked.

"Not unless you wish to be," Zanta replied. "The spell will affect no one but Sam."

Dean looked at Sam and raised his eyebrows: _You want me to stay close?_

For answer, Sam lay down with his head on Dean's lap. Dean smiled and patted Sam's shoulder.

Then Sam took a deep breath and let it out again. "Okay. Let's go."

As Zanta began to chant again, Sam's head started swimming, and he was glad he was already lying down. His eyes slid closed almost of their own accord, and he let himself drift as the magic pulled him deeper, not really floating, not really drowning, just letting go and feeling the world getting bigger and farther away... or himself getting smaller... and smaller...

Noise. Far away, down the stairs, the TV. Not loud, just enough he could hear.

 _(—down the stairs? They were on the first floor—)_

Other noise, something whispered, close. Man's voice. Not Daddy. Not familiar. Bad smell, like eggs.

 _(Sulfur—a demon—)_

He opened his eyes to dark, just a little light from the nightlight and from the light in the hall. But that was enough to show the silhouette of a man standing over his crib—with eyes that gleamed yellow from corner to corner. And words, bad words, words he didn't understand but still wrapped around him like itchy, bitey things looking for a way in.

He fussed quietly. _Mommy, Daddy, please..._

"John?" Mommy's voice _(he'd forgotten he'd ever heard Mom's voice; he wished he could see her face, just to have something to hold onto)_. "Is he hungry?"

"Shhh." Not Daddy, like a snake.

"Okay." _No, Mommy, don't go!_

But footsteps in the hall, and words kept biting and pulled his mouth open, and something dripped in—hot, thick, sticky, YUCK! _(Copper and egg—blood and sulfur—)_ It ran down his throat, and the words got _in_ , and he wailed as they sank right into his bones—

" _YOU!_ " Mommy came back!

—and Yellow-eyes turned, and Mommy screamed, and she went up and up and right on the ceiling  
 _(like Jess on the ceiling)_

and Daddy yelled "MARY!"  
 _(Dad, I'm so sorry)_

and Mommy caught fire  
 _(like Jess was on fire)_

and he sat bolt upright screaming, blood on his tongue and smoke in his nose, and his brain couldn't sort what was now, what was then, but somebody had him, held tight—too big _(too small)_ , Daddy's voice _(no, not quite)_ , gun oil and leather, coffee and cordite, but—there, underneath, that was Dean _(that was Dean)_. He knew that scent better than he knew his own name.

 _Dean's got me.  
(Dean's got me.)_

 _I'm safe._

Sam buried his nose in the crook of Dean's neck and held tight to the one constant thing in his life until his head stopped spinning and he came back to awareness enough to hear someone weeping quietly. It took another moment or two for him to realize that it wasn't Jess or even himself who was crying audibly—it was Henry.

The voice that finally broke the silence, however, was Uncle Adam's: "She knew him."

"Yeah," Dean said quietly. "And she was _ticked_."

Sam sniffled. "How do you know?"

Dean sighed and rubbed Sam's back a little. "Mom and Dad had some trouble right after you were born. I don't remember a lot; I, uh... kinda hid in my closet for most of it. But I remember enough. The way she yelled when she came back... that wasn't 'Come back here and clean up this mess, Dean Michael' kind of mad. That was 'John Eric Winchester, I'll gut you like a fish if you ever do that again.'"

Startled, Sam raised his head. "Seriously? They had fights _that_ bad?"

Dean nodded sadly. "Wasn't the perfect marriage until after she died."

Henry sobbed again, and Sam put his head back on Dean's shoulder.

"So the demon _wasn't_ telling us the whole truth," Agatha mused. "Granted, she did recognize Azazel somehow, whether she ever made a deal with him or not."

"She might have," Pastor Jim admitted. "John told me once that the night he proposed, he'd taken Mary out to a park outside of Lawrence, but he had a vague memory of her dad showing up and dragging him out of the car—and the next thing he knew, he was waking up on the ground with his head in her lap. She was crying, and Mr. Campbell was a few feet away, dead."

Henry stopped crying with a startled hiccup. "Campbell?"

"Uh, yes, Samuel Campbell, I think his name was."

Henry sighed raggedly. "He was a hunter. An _elite_ hunter, one of the few the Letters worked with whom I knew. But possession is uncommon in any case, and yellow-eyed demons are extremely rare and powerful, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if he went into a hunt unprepared for more than a black-eyed demon and wound up possessed by the one we just saw."

"I'll say they're rare," Bobby agreed. "Ain't never heard of 'em apart from the research John's done lookin' for this'n. Reckon it could be Azazel?"

"Azazel, Dagon, Asmodeus, or Ramiel. Yellow eyes were the mark of the four Princes of Hell. We were taught that they'd all been killed off, but then again, we'd heard the same of the Knights of Hell, including Abaddon, and obviously _that_ wasn't true."

"The demon said Mary made a deal, quote, 'to get her shot at normal,'" Gil stated. "Let's assume that means a deal for John's life, if the reason he woke up on the ground was that Azazel had actually killed him. When did this happen?"

"It was May 2, 1973," Pastor Jim replied.

Sam's blood ran cold.

"Okay," Tarvek cut in, "but demon deals come due in exactly ten years, not ten years and six months."

"That's my point," Agatha agreed. "Even assuming she did make that deal, she clearly wasn't expecting Azazel to be in the house that night at all, and she definitely wouldn't react that way if she thought Azazel had any right to be in Sam's nursery. That tells me she didn't know until _that moment_ exactly what she had agreed to when she'd accepted the deal."

" _Oui_ ," said Colette (and Sam resignedly realized that everyone in the house must have come in while Zanta was putting him under). "She probably thought that whatever she had agreed to give up, Azazel had claimed while she was at the hospital giving birth to Sam. I heard the wrath of a woman betrayed as much as a protective mother."

"So it ain't fair to say Mary sold Sam," Bobby concluded. "What about this curse, though, ma'am? We could all see it was blood magic."

"Yes, and of a type I have not seen before," Zanta answered. "Sam's memory was not clear enough for me to understand the exact words, but I think I understand what it did and why it had to be performed on that night of all nights. Sam, did you sense the spell when it took hold?"

Sam nodded. "Felt like it got into my bones. I can still kinda feel it, if I'm honest, like a dull sort of itch."

"Into the bones—" Violetta echoed.

"—into the _marrow_ ," Tarvek added, sounding horrified.

"I fear so," Zanta confirmed. "It appears that the spell causes the bone marrow to produce elements in the blood that are normally found only in the possessed."

Sam gulped. "You're—you're saying—I've got _demon blood?!_ "

"Not to the same degree as someone possessed by a demon. But the traces are there."

"Isn't there any cure? I mean, can't the curse be broken?"

Zanta sighed. "I do not know. Blood curses seldom can."

Sam was so stunned, the rest of the conversation didn't even register. He managed to snap out of it enough to bid goodbye to the Clays and walk out to the car when Rufus announced that the road was clear enough to be safe, but he spent the entire drive back to the bunker in a daze, so much so that he didn't realize anyone else had come with the Winchesters until he got out in the garage and there was still a line of cars pulling in behind the Impala. Dean was directing traffic while Tarvek and Van unloaded Zoing from the back of Gil and Agatha's new Chevy HHR; Henry was headed toward the stairs with Ardsley and Colette; Zeetha was waiting for Klaus and Zanta to park; Bobby was signaling something to Pastor Jim, whose car was at the back of the line and who had Violetta riding shotgun; and Rufus...

... Rufus was letting Jess out before he tried to maneuver his truck into a parking space. She'd been so quiet, Sam had forgotten all about her.

Embarrassed, Sam shouldered his way through the crowd and smiled sheepishly at her. "Hey."

"Hi," she replied with a small smile and let him take her backpack.

"Thanks for coming."

"Glad I came." She bit her lip. "Mind showing me around some?"

"Sure, sure." He slung the backpack over his shoulder, and she took his hand as he ushered her toward the stairs.

Everyone else, it seemed, was heading toward the bedroom wing, so Sam took Jess through the library first, then through some of the labs and the infirmary. The lingering awkwardness between them faded as the tour went on, although he caught himself babbling a few times. By the time they started back toward the kitchen, Henry was helping Colette and Ardsley do something with the computer in the command center, and Dean was leading everyone else into the library, except for Gil and Van, who were already inside and looking for an outlet into which to plug Zoing's tank. And when Sam and Jess finally got to the bedroom wing, all the rooms had evidently been allocated, since each door bore a sticky-note label in Van's neat handwriting. They laughed quietly, and Sam gallantly opened the door to the room with Jess' name on it and let her go in ahead of him.

"It's kinda like being back in the dorms again," he said as he followed her in. She stopped to look in the closet, so he passed behind her and put her bag down on the desk. "The sheets should be clean; I mean, they haven't been slept on for almost fifty years. But the mattress might be kind of uncomfortable." He went to the bed to fiddle anxiously with the covers. "It's horsehair, so sometimes it crackles when you roll over. Dean's been trying to find a good deal on memory foam mattresses so we can replace them all. The wi-fi is awesome, though, and you don't need a password—"

The door slammed shut. He spun... and she was walking back toward him with _that look_ in her eyes.

"Uh, Jess? A-are you sure you... I-I-I mean, do you really..."

"Sam," she interrupted. "I know you, remember?"

"But after this morning—"

"That's what I mean. I know you'll keep stewing over it all night unless somebody else takes your mind off it. Plus, I had a long talk with Mr. Turner on the way down here. And even knowing about the demon blood now... like I told you on Wednesday, I've _missed you_." And she kissed him—hard.

It was quite some time before he could catch his breath enough to whisper, "I've missed you, too."

* * *

Henry sat down at the map table and watched bemusedly as Colette squeezed herself further inside the command center's main computer, chasing down the last connection to the main Letters network and singing snatches of some silly French song (" _Un deux trois, mon chat François, /_ _un trois deux, mon chat est bleu_ ") to herself as she worked. He wondered idly whether she were trying to become one with the machine, but he didn't want to break her concentration by asking and risk making her hurt herself.

He'd already seen far too much pain and suffering that day that he couldn't have prevented if he'd tried—if he'd even had the chance to try. He couldn't bear hurting anyone else, no matter how slight the hurt might be... at least not today.

His train of thought was interrupted by Ardsley handing him an ice-cold Coke. "Here you are, old chap," Ardsley said. "Thought you could do with a bit of sugar just now."

"Actually, I was getting thirsty," Henry admitted with a smile. "Thanks."

Ardsley smiled back and sat down next to Henry with his own can of pop. "Not much more you and I can do on the computer at this point, anyway. Best to let Colette do the rest—she's a proper wizard at this sort of thing."

"I thought Sam told me you handled a lot of computer work for Gil and Agatha."

"Only the communications end of it. Gil did all the software maintenance, unless it was a program Agatha's written herself. But it was Colette who actually built the system hardware for us. Gil and Agatha—well, and Tarvek, really—deal more in robotics."

"I see." And Henry did see, sort of. Sam had been giving him computer lessons off and on, when they weren't busy researching. Still, he knew he had a lot of catching up to do; technology had changed radically since '58, as had many other things. But that reminded him of something he'd been meaning to ask. He took a drink first before saying, "Y'know, Ardsley... I hope this doesn't sound rude, but you... sound a lot more like somebody my age—my generation, I mean—than I would have expected."

Ardsley chuckled ruefully. "I suppose I do, rather. My father was gone so much when I was a child that I ended up spending a great deal more time with my grandparents than with anyone my own age."

"Ah, yes, that would affect your terminology."

Ardsley chuckled again, but then his smile dimmed, and he lowered his voice. "But enough about me. How are you?"

Henry sighed heavily. "Better, honestly. Had a long talk with Dean and Zeetha on the way home; poor Sam was still too out of it." He paused. "I can't say I wish I hadn't recommended that he go along with Her Majesty's request. Can't say I wish I didn't know what I know now. I just... wish I could do _something_."

"I think we all feel the same. But as you said yourself, you can't go back."

"No. I know. We went over it again on the way home. Even if I went back far enough to save Josie, I don't have a clue how I could take Millie and John and go to ground, whether I'd even be able to hold onto John if I tried or whether... whether something would make sure he wound up in Lawrence without me anyway. Whether I'd die before I even had the chance to try."

"Likely. Very likely. Seems some frightfully powerful beings are willing to do anything to make sure their plan comes off, and a large part of it depends on John growing up without you."

" _Et LA!_ " suddenly echoed from the computer, and Colette clambered out with a triumphant clatter. " _C'est fait!_ "*

"Oh, good show!" Ardsley answered warmly. "Fully cut off, then?"

"And with a phantom connection created so that London should be none the wiser. If they noticed anything at all, it should appear no more than a temporary disruption of the signal."

Ardsley grinned at Henry. "Told you she's a wizard, didn't I?"

"Never doubted it for a minute," Henry replied and raised his pop can in salute.

"Perfect timing," Zeetha announced, sliding down the banister of the stairs that led to the main entrance while Zantabraxus followed by actually walking. "Mom's just finished adding another layer of wards. We'll have to add Theo and Sleipnir when they come out next month, but as of now, the doors won't open for anyone but us, even if they get hold of a key."

"Speaking of keys," Van added, coming out of the lab wing with a loaded keychain, "I found the spares in a storeroom. I don't think there are quite enough for each person to have one, unless we can make more, but there should at least be one for each couple."

"Making more is no problem," Tarvek announced as the group in the library also trickled back into the command center. "That is, assuming one of the labs has the metals we need; it requires not only the precise shape and warding charms but also a specific alloy. We found the instructions, though, so it won't take much effort."

Dean nodded. "We haven't inventoried the labs yet, but with all of us working on it, it shouldn't take long."

"I'd say that's a chore for tomorrow," said Klaus, and everyone else murmured agreement.

"All the same," said Ardsley, "we can't take any chances. We'd best start planning the proper way to deal with Sinclair, not only to eliminate his threat but also to gain a second redoubt."

"Once we do," Colette noted, "Ash has already suggested that we establish a secure video conferencing network between our two bases and the Roadhouse. That way we won't need to be all in one place to exchange information."

"Ardsley's got a point, though," Rufus chimed in. "Sinclair was a Master o' Spells, an' he's had fifty years to get even stronger. Good chance we can't just shoot 'im."

"Had plenty o' time to learn how to defend against witch-killin' spells, too," Bobby added, "'specially the ones the Men of Letters already knew."

"So we need a weapon he can't defend against," Gil concluded.

Agatha hummed thoughtfully. "I wonder what it would take to build a death ray."

"You would," chorused the rest of the Adventure Club.

"John's got a line on a gun," Klaus admitted, and Henry's heart sank. "Made by Samuel Colt for a hunter back in 1835. Supposed to kill anything, so he wants it to kill Yellow-eyes. That's about all I know, though; he wouldn't even tell me where he thinks it is."

Dean frowned. "You think he has it yet?"

"Probably not. Before we split up in April, I overheard him arguing with someone on the phone a couple of times. It sounded like whoever has the gun won't let him have it."

Henry sighed heavily. "I'm not surprised."

Klaus blinked. "You know who has it, then?"

Henry nodded. "It's been in the hands of the Elkins family of Manning, Colorado, since 1861. Unless something has changed in the past fifty years, the last surviving member of that family is a hunter named Daniel Elkins."

"I know him," Rufus stated. "Vampire expert, mean ol' cuss. Never married, no kids."

"That doesn't surprise me at all. He was a mean young cuss when I had the misfortune to work with him on a case; I don't know what woman would willingly put up with his sour attitude. He hunted vampires with a vendetta, and I never found out why."

Bobby nodded slowly. "John said he used to work with Elkins 'fore he met me, learned a lot from 'im, but they didn't part on good terms. 'Course, John's turnin' into a mean ol' cuss himself, so it just figures they'd butt heads."

"Also figures Elkins won't give up the Colt for just the askin'," Rufus continued. "He's a tight-fisted son of a gun; don't reckon he'd part with a dime without kickin' up a fuss, let alone somethin' that rare an' powerful."

Dean's eyes narrowed. "What about a trade?"

"What," Gil asked as the elder hunters raised eyebrows and exchanged looks, "like, see if there's something here of equal value?"

"That, or maybe we can make our own. Maybe not exactly the same as the Colt, but at least powerful enough to kill your average demon or vampire—if there even are any vampires around still. Dad always told us they were extinct."

"Oh, I doubt that," Henry stated. "Vampires can be incredibly crafty when it comes to hiding themselves, and unless the Alpha Vampire himself is killed, he can always turn more humans to rebuild the race."

"Alpha?"

"First of the kind. Almost every monster type that breeds or turns can be traced back to an Alpha, created by or descended from the Mother of All Monsters. The one exception I know of is the phoenix; it's said that 'the ashes of the phoenix will burn the Mother.' But she's locked away in Purgatory, so I don't think we need to worry about her at the moment."

"Would the Colt kill an Alpha?"

"I believe so, but it's not worth anyone's while to try to find out. Samuel Colt made only thirteen bullets for that gun. It might be possible to make more, but if so, we won't be able to find the answer here. Colt's journal is kept in the Campbell family archive in Lansing, Michigan. But the Campbells aren't likely to help us, knowing that the American Men of Letters are dead, or were until I arrived in this year. They never really liked working with us, even before; most of them won't work with anyone outside the family."

"Mm. And they aren't likely to help me and Sam, either, even though we're blood. Never did a damn thing to help us after the fire. Mom's uncles put up a marker for her in the family plot in the cemetery in Greenville, Illinois, but didn't even invite us to the memorial service. We didn't even know for sure they were hunters until this morning." Dean's tone was bitter, and Henry couldn't blame him.

But Violetta turned to Tarvek. "I bet we could get in there."

Tarvek raised one eyebrow. "Aren't your breaking-and-entering skills a little rusty?"

Violetta scoffed. " _Please_. It hasn't been _that_ long. Besides, if Colette comes with us..."

"To microfilm the journal, _hein?_ " Colette asked with a devious grin. "Or perhaps the whole library?"

"Better make it just the one journal," said Tarvek. "We can always go back later, as long as we don't get caught."

"You can take Violetta home while you're at it," Pastor Murphy suggested. "David Gideon's filling in for me this Sunday anyway, so I don't need to leave for a few days yet, and I can probably do more good pitching in with what needs to be done here."

Tarvek nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Why do I have to—" Violetta started to object.

"Because there won't be anything for you to do in the next two weeks," Agatha replied. "Even if we get everything we need tomorrow, we can't take everyone to assault Sinclair's mansion. Too many cars would attract too much attention. And when that's done, we'll still need more information before we can find either Azazel or Uncle John. You may as well finish the semester and come back after finals."

"At which time," Pastor Murphy added, "we can discuss whether you may take a leave of absence for the spring semester."

Violetta sighed and nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Getting back to the gun," said Gil. "There's no guarantee that Colt's journal will have the information we need to make a second one, or more ammo, or anything of the sort. Even if it does, there's no guarantee that we'll be able to do it quickly."

Klaus hummed in agreement. "John did say something about it having been forged under Halley's Comet. That won't be back until 2062. If any comet would do, there are a couple of minor ones appearing in May, but..."

"Something tells me we can't wait that long," Dean finished. "Gil's right. We should still get the info from Colt's journal, but we gotta come up with something else to trade Elkins for the gun."

"Mom?" Zeetha asked.

"Let us wait for the Geminids," Zantabraxus said slowly. "They will peak at the full of the moon next month. I can invoke that power to charm at least one gun to kill low-level demons and monsters of most kinds."

"Can we make it at least two guns, ma'am?" Rufus asked. "If'n Sinclair's still got monsters runnin' around his place, likely we'll need extra firepower."

Zantabraxus nodded. "That is sensible, yes."

"And what happens if Elkins won't trade?" Ardsley asked.

Zeetha grinned even more deviously than Colette had. "Leave that to me."

Suddenly, Sam came out of the bedroom wing, in different clothes and with wet hair, looking distracted. "Hey, Dean, do we have any more deter- ... -gent?" he trailed off, noticing everyone looking at him.

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Detergent. Laundry?"

"Yeah, Jess, uh, needs to wash some stuff. Did... I... miss something?"

Dean sighed. "C'mon. I'll fill you in." And he stomped off toward the laundry room, leaving a confused Sam trailing in his wake.

The ensuing awkward silence was broken by Agatha clearing her throat. "So! Who wants turkey sandwiches for supper?"

Henry decided he really didn't want to know what Sam had been doing for however long it had been since he'd last been seen. "Sounds like a great idea to me."

* * *

.

* * *

* It's done!


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Tarvek was seething quietly by the time the lights of the Chicago metroplex finally became visible against the darkening horizon Saturday evening. The fact that the weather and the traffic had put them a good two hours behind schedule had only worsened his mood, which hadn't been great when they'd left Lebanon before dawn that morning to begin with. Hitting the Campbell compound under cover of darkness had been the plan all along, of course, but it was damp and cold and only going to get colder. And aside from the inherent misery of dealing with the elements, which was going to be necessary because Tarvek was supposed to stand guard and Henry had said the Campbells' underground archive was under a _barn_ , the state of the weather actually justified the Winchesters' insistence that the Murphys look the part by wearing blue-collar hunter chic.

He, Aaron Travis Sturmvoraus Murphy, who had very nearly minored in fashion design while at Stanford, was wearing _blue jeans_ and _plaid_ _flannel_ , plus steel-toed work boots, thick woolen socks, a sturdy fleece-lined jacket, and a stocking cap. Violetta had already had something that would work, and Colette had been able to borrow from Zeetha and Agatha, but Tarvek had resisted borrowing at all, so Dean and Gil had unceremoniously dragged him down to the Lebanon feed store— _the feed store!_ —and hadn't let him leave until he'd purchased the hideous outfit he had on now. At least Dean had conceded that contacts wouldn't raise any eyebrows, so Tarvek hadn't had to make matters worse by finding a cheap pair of glasses. Gil had even had the gall to maintain that these clothes were _practical_... and now the weather was proving him right, blast it all.

"Jealous, dear?" Colette asked in French with a gently teasing smile.

"Jealous?" Tarvek echoed in the same language. "Why?"

"Because we're here and you're not back in the bunker working on robots with Agatha."

"Oh, that. I forgot." And he had, honestly. Over supper the night before, Agatha had come up with the idea for two classes of robots to deploy in Sinclair's mansion: scout bots for scanning and cataloging everything from artifacts to lab contents, and explosive bots for clearing rooms in the menagerie. She'd had plans drafted by the time the abduction party returned from the feed store, and she'd been hard at work on prototypes by the time the Murphys had left that morning. Tarvek did have his own idea for a handheld medical scanner that he wanted to work on after they finished this job, but it really wasn't the same type of gadget Agatha was working on, and he'd said so from the start. Knowing Agatha, the lab she used would be swarming with tiny bots by now, and he probably wouldn't be able to think with all that commotion driving him to distraction. "Besides," he continued aloud, "it's still rather awkward trying to work with Agatha on anything."

Colette blinked. "With or without Gil there?"

"Yes. Both. It's not as bad anymore in a social setting, and we are good friends, but... there are some things I can't forget."

"You mean things your father told you about her birth mother?"

"Well, that, yes, but also... he wanted me to marry her."

" _What?!_ After he ensured that her possession by Lucrezia was fully successful?!"

"I know, I know. I think it was mostly to keep up appearances, make everything look legal. How the hell that was supposed to work when she was nine, I have no idea. He said something about not minding sharing with me, though, and something else that sounded like he thought maybe Lucrezia could hand control back to Agatha sometimes so Agatha would be 'mine' and Lucrezia would be 'his'—I don't even know anymore. He was usually high enough that he didn't remember that he had only a few years left before his deal came due. The point is, even though I was never really in love with her, I just... it's awkward, that's all."

Before Colette could respond, a quiet "Yahtzee!" from the back seat interrupted the conversation.

"You have spent entirely too much time around Sam," Tarvek remarked in English.

"Shut up," Violetta shot back. "I have not. You know John's always been afraid I'd turn on him."

Colette shifted to look back at Violetta more directly. "Have you found us a cover story?"

"Boy, have I ever." Violetta carefully handed Colette her laptop. "I think this is one you guys will actually need to take. It's in St. Louis."

Tarvek frowned. "What is it?"

"String of murders with similar MOs, all within a ten-mile radius: woman found in a chair, bound and gagged and beaten to death. Husband or boyfriend—or girlfriend in a couple of cases—is arrested for the murder but claims to have been somewhere else, usually with witnesses, even though security camera footage places the accused at the scene at the time of the murder."

"A doppelgänger?"

"I'm thinking shapeshifter, but you'll probably have to get access to the surveillance footage to be sure. Papa Jim told me one time you can tell a shifter from a human by the way the light reflects off the retina into the camera; a shifter's eyes flare silver, not red like a human's."

"So why do you think we specifically need to take this one?"

"The most recent case, just last night," Colette answered, reading the page that was open on Violetta's laptop. "This says, 'The victim's boyfriend, Zachary Warren, 24, was arrested and charged with the murder. Warren claims to have been at his parents' house with his sister, Rebecca, who was to have returned to school in California today.'"

Tarvek blinked. "Wait, that's... Becky and Zach, Sam's friends? The same Becky Jess stayed with right after the attack?"

" _Oui_. They came to a few Adventure Club parties with Sam, I think."

"They did," Violetta confirmed. "One of them was a time when I'd come to visit you guys. That's how I recognized Zach's mugshot in the news story."

Tarvek nodded. "Right. I remember talking with Zach a few times. Even with a few of Theo's cocktails in him, he wasn't a violent sort. I definitely can't picture him beating his girlfriend to death." He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment. "We've never hunted a shapeshifter before. It might be worth seeing what lore the Campbells have so we don't go in unprepared."

"Wouldn't it be easier to call the Winchesters?"

Tarvek shook his head. "No, you know Sam. He'll want to handle it personally, and Dean won't be able to convince him to let us take it so they can stay under cover. Sam's liable to forget that hex bags don't protect against human eyes, and we have no idea where Zola is or whether Azazel has other humans working for him." There was also the unresolved sartorial issue, which _would_ come up again if Sam and Dean met them in St. Louis, but Tarvek wasn't going to say anything about that right now. "I can call Theo to get contact info for Becky, but it's better if we don't say anything to the Winchesters until the hunt's over."

Colette raised an eyebrow, but all she said was, "All right."

They stopped in Joliet for gas and supper, during which Violetta gave them an initial briefing on the area where the crimes were occurring, a historic neighborhood called Hyde Park. From there, it was another four hours to the Campbell compound outside of Lansing, which was time enough for Violetta to do further digging into the facts of the case. "It's looking more and more like a shapeshifter," she reported as Tarvek finally turned off the highway and tried not to worry about the snowflakes drifting past the headlights. "Each of the houses where a murder occurred had been burglarized shortly beforehand—a week, usually. Only clothing was taken in each burglary. The police think it's just a coincidence, maybe someone coming out from downtown or crossing the river from East St. Louis looking for a quick score; Hyde Park's not more than a few miles from either area, so that's easy enough walking distance if a crook's determined to go there. But the burglar somehow always manages _not_ to get caught by security cameras, while the killer somehow always _does_."

"Sounds like a deliberate frame-up," Tarvek mused. "Not that it didn't already, but surely a homeowner knows where his or her security cameras are better than a random schlub from another town and would be just as anxious, if not more so, to avoid them if the alibi being claimed is to hold up. But now I'm wondering why that hasn't occurred to the police."

"The prime suspect's always caught inside the house, and the killer's never recorded leaving the house. Plus, most of the residents in Hyde Park are African-American."

"Ahhh," Tarvek and Colette chorused. As an interracial couple, they understood the implications all too well.

Just then, a row of dusk-to-dawn lights perpendicular to the road became visible, recalling the Murphys' attention to the task at hand. They reviewed their plan of action one last time, so when the car turned in at the drive and stopped at the gate, they all had their most innocent, disarming smiles ready to turn on the two guards with submachine guns who immediately approached the car while Tarvek rolled down the windows.

"Evening," Tarvek called to the guard who came around to the driver's window. "Our name is Murphy; we're friends of Sam Winchester's. He suggested we come here for research help."

"Research?" the guard echoed suspiciously.

"Yes, you see, we're investigating a possible shapeshifter attack in St. Louis, and Sam thought your family might have more information than his immediate family currently has access to."

"I'll need to see some identification."

"Yes, of course."

Tarvek reached into his pocket at the same time Colette reached into hers. Together they recited a short Enochian phrase, raised and opened their hands, and blew chamomile into the guards' faces. By the time the guards hit the ground unconscious, Violetta was already out of the back seat and picking the lock on the gate; Tarvek and Colette got out to drag the guards out of harm's way, and Violetta opened the gate. Tarvek then jumped back in the car to drive into the compound and park while Colette ran through on foot and helped Violetta close and lock the gate again. Then, sticking to the shadows as much as possible, they converged on one of the ramshackle buildings behind what looked like a large livestock barn. Violetta checked for signs of an alarm system, and finding none, she made short work of opening the latch of one of the windows and then the window itself. All three of them climbed inside as quickly as possible, and Violetta shut and locked the window again.

Colette shone a red LED light around the room, revealing it to be a roughed-in office space with walls of bare board and corrugated metal; there were shelves, a bulletin board, and a worn desk and '70s-vintage desk chair, but the wooden walls had gaps between the boards, and the metal door had rust spots. Tarvek tried the handle as gently as possible and found that it turned easily, but a slight tug encountered resistance, which meant the door had to be padlocked from the outside. Violetta stamped quietly on the floor until she found a spot that sounded hollow under the desk, so the three of them moved the desk out of the way, and Colette set about finding the latch to lift while Tarvek turned his own attention to getting a length of wire through a gap near the door and into the padlock. He was just starting the fiddly process of picking the lock when he heard the girls climb down the ladder into the archive behind him—he was sure the sound wouldn't travel far, but metal ladders were almost impossible to descend silently.

Actually picking the lock didn't take terribly long, although it would have gone faster if Tarvek had had a magnet capable of keeping the lock still despite the door. Getting the lock off the latch and getting the latch open, all without making much noise or leaving scratches anywhere, was harder. (It should have been impossible if the office had been properly constructed, but clearly the Campbells had staked all their security on the two guards at the gate, the mundane appearance of the buildings, and whatever wards there might be about the place. Tarvek strongly disapproved.) He managed to get the door open in the end, however, and slipped out of the office to wait and keep watch. There were windows in the outside wall that let in enough light for him to see tolerably well, so he split his time between watching for motion outside and watching for motion inside.

It wasn't many minutes more before he heard a slight noise, turned, and found himself at the business end of a shotgun. The light spilling in from outside revealed the person holding the gun to be a round-faced young man with fair hair and beard, a stony expression, and steely blue eyes. His ability to get this close without alerting Tarvek to his presence meant that he must be a very good hunter indeed.

"Ah!" Tarvek exclaimed, reasonably sure the other man couldn't see past him to know that the padlock was in his pocket and not on the door. "Thank goodness you've finally turned up, Mr. Campbell. It is Mr. Campbell, isn't it?"

"Mark," said the other man.

"Mark? Nice to meet you. My name's Murphy, Aaron Murphy. Sam Winchester sent me." When that garnered no reaction at all, Tarvek tried again. "Mary's son? Mary Campbell? Samuel's daughter? I-I think you and Sam must be cousins..."

"Fifth cousin, twice removed."

"Ah, really? What an interesting family you have."

Mark Campbell didn't even twitch.

"The reason I'm here," Tarvek plowed on, hoping he didn't sound desperate, "is to get some information about shapeshifters. There's a case in St. Louis that my partners and I think may be a shapeshifter that's gone serial, but we've never tried to hunt a shapeshifter before, so we don't even know where to start looking—"

"Sewers."

"Pardon?"

Campbell just blinked, as if to say, _You heard me_.

"It... may be living in the sewers? Is that what you mean?"

Campbell nodded once.

Score another one for Winchester/Wulfenbach ingenuity; at least Tarvek wouldn't have to get anything else grubby if they had to go crawling through a sewer system, and he'd have the perfect excuse to salt and burn this outfit if the smell didn't come out. "How will we know when we're close to its lair, though? I mean, the smell won't exactly..."

"Skin."

"Skin. It... it sheds its skin when it shifts?!"

Campbell nodded once.

"That's... rather disgusting. All right. Uh, is there any special ammunition or..."

"Silver."

"Silver bullets."

Campbell nodded once and pointed the shotgun at Tarvek's heart.

Tarvek startled back several steps, hands raised, before he realized. " _Oh_. Silver bullet to the _heart_."

Campbell nodded again, more deeply, as if to say, _Now you're catching on._

"Got it. R-right, well, is... is there any further information we need, or..."

Campbell shook his head.

"Uh, okay, well, I did promise to wait here for my partners—"

"Oh, there you are!" Violetta called from behind Campbell, distracting him just long enough that Tarvek could get the padlock back on the door and grab another handful of chamomile out of his pocket. "Any luck?"

"Yes, actually," Tarvek replied. "Mr. Campbell here has very graciously given me all the information he thinks we need. So thank you very much, Mark, and..." He recited the spell again and blew chamomile in Campbell's face, and Campbell went down without a sound.

"Colette's gone to get the gate," Violetta reported as she and Tarvek raced out of the building to the car. "Did he really..."

"Yeah, all four words of it," Tarvek replied. "But that should be enough. You?"

"Got the journal microfilmed and took overview pictures of everything else. That'll save us some time if we have to come back. They didn't have much, though, at least not compared to Mr. Singer and the bunker library."

They jumped in the car and drove through the opened gate, then stopped while Colette shut and locked the gate again and got back in the car. Yet Tarvek didn't relax until they were safely back on the highway and had been neither followed nor fired upon. Just to be extra safe, once they got well into Lansing itself, they took adjacent rooms in a three-star hotel under the surname of Voltaire, and Colette did all the talking and put the rooms on one of the few credit cards she had left from before their marriage. But nobody crashed in on them at any point during the night, which was a good thing considering the way Colette chose to warm Tarvek up and take the edge off his anxiety and annoyance—an effective way, but one that did leave a person rather vulnerable.

Things were going too smoothly, Tarvek thought glumly when the alarm went off just a few hours later. In fact, he was so convinced that something was about to go disastrously wrong that it was almost a relief to go down to the continental breakfast and hear the weather news people on the TV discussing a massive lake-effect snowstorm that had walloped the south shore of Lake Michigan overnight, shutting down all but emergency traffic on I-94 and I-90. The main reason it wasn't entirely a relief was that the only way to get from Lansing to Blue Earth in a reasonable amount of time was over that very route, and he said as much as they ate.

"Isn't there any alternative?" Colette asked.

Tarvek shook his head. "Not one that wouldn't add at least another half-day to our drive time. We'd probably have to go all the way down to Indianapolis to hit a safe alternate route, and by that point, we'd be halfway to St. Louis already."

Violetta's eyes widened, then turned into high-beam puppy eyes.

"You _have_ been spending too much time with Sam!" Tarvek grouched.

" _Please_ , Trav?" she pleaded, mindful of the fact that they weren't alone in the breakfast room. "As late as we'd be getting in, I'd be too exhausted to go to class tomorrow anyway, and you might not be able to get back to St. Louis before Tuesday night, which could... well, you know." _Could mean the shifter would have time to strike again_ remained unspoken. "If I go with you, we could rent me a car tomorrow morning, or maybe Papa Jim could meet us and take me home himself."

"She does have a point," Colette said quietly, more to her coffee than to him.

Tarvek sighed heavily. "Oh, all right. You email your professors when we get back to the room; I'll call Papa Jim, and Colette can call Theo."

Colette swallowed her sip of coffee and shook her head. "Not this early, _cheri_. You forget the time difference."

"Shoot, you're right. What time does his ICU shift start?"

"Mm, not until 8:00, I think. And we are three hours ahead, so..."

Violetta blinked. "Wait, you know who you _should_ call? Van!"

Colette lit up. "But of course! Van knows everybody. I'll text and also ask him to have Papa Jim call us when Sam can't overhear."

"Now ain't that interesting?" a female voice drawled behind Tarvek, its tone consisting of equal parts suspicion and sarcasm.

Tarvek didn't turn around; he'd known the two people standing behind his chair had been listening from a nearby table but hadn't been sure who they were until now. "Won't you join us, Miss Campbell?"

"Not until you answer some questions, Murphy, or whatever the hell your name is."

"My name _is_ Murphy, and it's difficult to have a conversation like this. I presume that's Mark beside you?"

The stolid silence that greeted that question spoke for itself.

"If Sam Winchester really sent you," Miss Campbell pressed, "why are you so anxious for him not to know you're here?"

"He knows we're _here_ ," Colette corrected. "He doesn't know that the latest incident involves a friend of his. And he is currently engaged with another case that he can't drop—to leave now for the sake of his friend could be fatal, but we wouldn't be able to convince him of that."

"How do you mean, fatal?"

"Catastrophic," Violetta answered. "Apocalyptic, even."

There was a pause, and then the tall, dark-haired, fair-skinned woman he'd seen out the corner of his eye stalked around the table and sat down across from Tarvek, still on her guard. Mark seemingly stayed where he was.

"What did you take last night?" Miss Campbell demanded quietly.

"Nothing," Tarvek stated, which was technically true.

"So what the hell did you come for?"

"Information."

"Like hell you did. Even if I buy the case, which I don't, there are hunters closer to St. Louis than this."

"Yes, but apparently my cousin here is the only one who's looked at the deaths closely enough to discern the pattern. And we have it on good authority that only your family had the precise information we needed, not only for our own case, but also for Sam's."

"Information about what?"

"The Colt."

Mark snorted, and Miss Campbell scoffed. "The Colt don't exist," she declared, "and even if it did, we don't have it."

Tarvek settled back in his seat and crossed his arms. "I never said you _did_. I said we needed information."

"Who told you we had any? Sam sure as hell couldn't know about that; his old man's a loose cannon, and we ain't workin' with him. And for that matter, where'd you get whatever sleep spell you used on Mark?"

"The answer to both questions is the same: the Men of Letters."

Miss Campbell's jaw dropped. "Who the _hell_ do you think you're kidding?" she whispered harshly. "The Men of Letters are _dead_."

" _Were_ dead," Colette corrected again. "One of them came back."

Miss Campbell looked like she was about to protest again, but Tarvek intervened. "Look, Miss Campbell—"

"Gwen," Gwen interrupted sharply.

"Let me give you some friendly advice, Gwen. Mark did us a good turn last night, and I'd like to make up for knocking him out."

"Shoot."

"There are forces at work now that have been dormant for millennia, curses laid that no power on earth has seen before, powers determined to make the Winchesters comply with a plan we're trying to uncover and stop. They may come after you because of your kinship with Mary. If you value your life and the lives of your family, work with us instead of shutting us out. Help us help the Winchesters."

Gwen looked up at Mark for a moment, the anger on her face fading to something less discernible. Then she looked at Tarvek again. "Gimme your phone number."

"Reaching for my card case," he announced and pulled said card case out of his front pants pocket, took a business card out of it, and wrote his cell phone number on the back with a pen Colette handed him. "And if you want to check up on our story," he added as he passed the card across to Gwen, "the name of Sam's friend is Zachary Warren."

Gwen nodded once, accepted Tarvek's card, and handed him her own. "Don't call unless it's an emergency."

He nodded and accepted her card. "Understood. Thank you."

With that, Gwen stood, and she and Mark left without another word.

"You know she's planning to track your phone," Violetta noted, scraping blackberry jam onto another piece of toast.

"Then it's a good thing I told her the truth, isn't it?" Tarvek replied with a wink and took a drink of coffee.

Back in the room, Tarvek took a nap while Violetta emailed her professors and Colette texted with Van. They were checked out and on the road by 8, which got them to Indianapolis in time for lunch and to St. Louis in time to meet Papa Jim at a hotel and brief him on the hunt. Then Colette called Becky and arranged for her to meet them at the Ruth's Chris location in Clayton for dinner.

Once the general catching-up had finished and the steak order was on its way to the kitchen, Becky shook her head. "I really am glad to see you guys, don't get me wrong, but... I don't understand why you're here. Your whole club just took off from Palo Alto, like, a day after Brady attacked Jess. And then Jess disappeared on Wednesday..."

"She's safe," Colette assured her quickly. "She met us in Beetleburg for Thanksgiving with Gil and Agatha; it was something of a last-minute decision. And she and Sam have made up. They're with Dean and Zeetha right now."

Becky frowned. "Beetleburg? I've heard Sam mention it, but..."

"It's in Nebraska," Violetta supplied. "The Winchesters had to go take care of some family business, but we saw the story about Zach's girlfriend and thought since we were already out this way, we'd stop by and offer to help."

"But... but _how?_ The lawyer said the police think it's an open-and-shut case. They've got security camera video showing Zach coming home at 10:30, and they won't believe me that he was with me, at our parents' house here in Clayton, until at least after midnight."

"What about your parents?" Papa Jim asked.

Becky shook her head, and a tear rolled down her cheek. "Mom and Dad are in Paris half the year. Zach and I were the only people in the house. And so far, we haven't been able to find a neighbor with security cameras placed in a way that would prove Zach was here. But he _couldn't_ have done it—nobody can be in two places at one time!"

Tarvek reached over to give Becky's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "We believe you. Look, Colette's dad has connections to the _Sûreté_ in Paris, and Violetta's been doing some research on other deaths in the neighborhood. We think we can prove Zach's been framed by a serial killer who's a master of disguise."

Becky sniffled. "Is... is that why somebody stole Zach's clothes last week?"

"Probably."

Becky sniffled again and used the Kleenex Colette handed her to wipe her face. "Okay. Thanks. What, um... what information do you need?"

* * *

Friday morning, as Jerry Panowski anxiously asked Dean to come to Pennsylvania to meet him in person, Dean shot an equally anxious look across the library table at Sam and suppressed a sigh. Sam and Tarvek were both going to hate him for his answer, but there wasn't much choice. Dean, Zeetha, and Dad had helped Jerry get a nasty poltergeist out of his house a couple of years earlier while Klaus had been working on something else in Mechanicsburg; Jerry was a nice guy, and Dean couldn't let him down.

"Listen, Jerry, I gotta be honest," Dean said. "We're tied up on somethin' in Kansas right now, and in this weather, it might take a week for us to get up there."

"Oh," said Jerry, plainly disappointed.

"But some friends of ours are in St. Louis, just wrapped up another hunt yesterday. I can call them and see if they'd be willing to fly out to Kittanning to help you with whatever this is."

"Are they as good as you and your wife and dad?"

Dean chuckled. "Ain't nobody _as_ good as we are, but yeah, they're good. I've worked with them since before I met Zeetha. Their names are Travis and Colette Murphy."

Sam looked up from his reading and frowned in confusion.

"Travis and Colette Murphy," Jerry repeated, evidently writing that down. "How will I know them?"

"Colette's French, and Trav's hair is about as red as Zeetha's is green."

"R—like, Carrot Top red or fire-engine red?"

"Eh, more magenta/maroon."

Jerry laughed. "Okay. I'll make a note of it. Thanks."

"No prob. Hey, how'd you get this number, anyway? I've only had it a few months."

"Oh, I tried to call your dad, but the voice message said to call you if it was an emergency and gave your number."

Dean blinked. "Oh. Huh."

"You didn't know?"

"No, we, uh, we're working separate cases right now. I'm not even sure where he is."

"Huh. Well—you're sure your friends can handle this?"

"Yeah, yeah, they'll be able to take care of it if they can get out there. And if they can't, I'll make arrangements with somebody else and call you back."

"Fair enough. Thanks, Dean." And after they exchanged farewells, Jerry hung up.

"What were Tarvek and Colette hunting in St. Louis?" Sam asked.

"Hang on a sec," Dean replied and called Colette to pass on Jerry's request and phone number. She assured him both that there was a flight they could catch at a reasonable time and that she'd be able to convince Tarvek to take the case, which eased Dean's discomfort only slightly.

"You know Tarvek hates to fly almost as much as you do," Gil noted from another table as Dean hung up.

Dean sighed. "Yeah, I know. But Caleb's snowed in, last I heard, so they really are the closest hunters we can trust."

"But why were they in St. Louis?" Sam pressed.

"Shapeshifter killed Zach Warren's girlfriend last week and framed him for it."

"WHAT?!"

"Dude, they _handled it_. Shifter's dead, and Zach's been released. It's okay. Becky doesn't even have to miss finals."

"What—but—did—did they have to tell Becky the truth? I mean, about us?"

"How the hell should I know, Sam? Ask Tarvek when they get back. Not like it would matter if you weren't so hell-bent on lyin' to all your friends."

Sam was Not Amused.

"'Sides, I got more important news. Jerry says he got through to Dad's voice mail."

Sam blinked. "Seriously?"

With a shrug of his eyebrows, Dean found Dad's number in his phone's contacts and put the phone on speaker while it dialed, then set the phone in the middle of the table while Henry placed his own bookmark and leaned forward to listen at the same time Sam did.

Not only did it ring several times, the automated voice that eventually answered said not that the number was out of service but, _"Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system."_

 _"This is John Winchester,"_ immediately followed in Dad's voice. _"I can't be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean."_

Dean exchanged a surprised look with Sam—and almost missed Henry reaching for the phone.

* * *

John cringed a little that evening when he checked his phone and saw Dean's number on the Missed Calls list. He'd just gotten his number restored the day before; he hadn't expected the boys to discover that it was working again quite this soon. There was a voicemail, too, so he braced himself for a cussing-out from Dean and played it.

 _"John,"_ said a voice he hadn't heard in nearly fifty years, and he almost dropped the phone in his shock. _"I'm aware that you can see the phone numbers that have called you, so yes, this is your father, and I am on Dean's phone. Your sons and Zeetha are with me, and they're safe. We're working on a plan to avenge Mary's death and the attack on Sam's girlfriend, whom I don't think you've met. Sam tells me you haven't kept in touch very well since he went to Stanford. In any case, we believe we have a way to stop Azazel and whatever plans he has for Sam. If you're willing to help, call us back at this number."_

Dazed, John hung up. Where the hell had Pops been all this time? Why had he come out of the woodwork _now_ , and how in the world had he found Sam and Dean? Or was this some sort of monster or demon just pretending to be Pops to lure John into a trap? There was such a thing as a crocotta, after all.

One thing was for damn sure, he decided as he poured himself a stiff drink. There was no way in hell he was calling Dean back before he was absolutely certain that it was safe—or that there was no other choice. Until then, he'd keep his distance and keep working on pinning down Azazel's next moves.

He could only hope whatever had used Pops' voice hadn't lied about the boys being safe.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

"I sure hope this works," Rufus said as he drove through a steep-sided canyon outside Manning, Colorado, on the morning of December 17. "It _is_ Sabbath, y'know; I'm not even s'posed to be drivin' today."

"I offered," Dean reminded him.

"Like I'm gonna trust my truck to a Winchester!"

Dean snorted. "Hey, I already promised to get you some extra gelt for your Hanukkah stocking. What more do you want?"

" _Goyishe kop_ ,"* Rufus grumbled.

Dean laughed.

Sam, who'd been jolted out of a reverie when Rufus first spoke, huffed to cover his relief at the unexpected comfort the hard teasing brought. He was really starting to regret having come on this trip. It had been bad enough to check into the hotel in Silverthorne the night before, stiff and sore from having been wedged in the middle of the bench seat of Rufus' truck for ten hours, and immediately have to duck into the exercise room to dodge a couple of acquaintances from Stanford who were apparently there for the skiing. Dean had just barely managed not to say _I told you so_ about Tarvek's decision not to tell Sam about the shifter in St. Louis until the hunt was over (though he'd sure thought it awfully loud—and Sam didn't even have the telepathic link to hear it). But an old hunting injury to the face meant Rufus snored like a freight train, and even if he hadn't, Sam had barely been able to sleep for vivid nightmares of Mom's death, the attack on Jess, and horribly twisted variations of the ritual Zanta had done on Thursday night to charm the hunters' combined arsenal and Agatha's exploding bots. For the real thing, Zanta had set up outside but still within the bunker's wards and had enlisted Agatha and the twins to join their powers to her own, and with Agatha being supercharged by standing barefoot on the snowy ground and Gil and Zeetha each channeling various aspects of the heavenly lights, the result had been spectacular and awe-inspiring. The nightmare versions had just been spectacularly awful.

And the perplexing thing was, Sam hadn't had such persistent nightmares during their stay at the bunker or in Beetleburg. He didn't know whether the problem now was being away from Jess, whose presence always seemed to ground him somehow, or being away from the bunker's wards. Either way, he almost wished they hadn't agreed to meet Theo and Sleipnir in Denver that night; he wasn't looking forward to a second night of this mess.

Then again, maybe he'd decide to ride back to the bunker with the DuMedds rather than spending a third day cramped in Rufus' truck. He understood why he was relegated to the middle of the seat, of course, but it was especially uncomfortable with his legs being as long as they were.

"But seriously," Rufus said, "your grandpappy and I ain't kiddin' when we say Elkins is mean. You know what your daddy's like; prob'ly don't surprise you much when you hear somebody or other quit talkin' to 'im."

"Or that he quit talking to them," Sam agreed. "Bobby's probably not the only one who backed it up with buckshot, either."

" _Bob_ just made the threat, but you're right. That's one reason I didn't want Dean bringin' his baby up here. Lot of hunters our age still associate that car with John, and I don't know exactly how bad things were when John an' Elkins parted company. Good chance he'd see you drive up an' start shootin' 'fore we even had a chance to say hello."

Dean grimaced.

"Ain't too sure how he'll react to seein' the two o' you, either. I told 'im I wanted to bring you, but I couldn't quite parse his answer; ain't sure he realizes you're grown. John does like to brag on you, especially Sam, but I don't know if he trusts Elkins that much or if Elkins even gave 'im a chance to say anything about you two 'cept whatever he knows about Azazel."

Sam blinked. "Dad brags on us? Since when?"

Rufus chuckled wryly. "Since always, Sam. Even more since you went to college. But I guess I ain't surprised he don't let on to you how proud he is. Guess he figures you already knew."

Sam and Dean exchanged a surprised look, but there wasn't time for further contemplation. A cabin, half buried in snow drifts, was coming into view through the trees. Dean double-checked that the pistol they were planning to offer in trade, a Walther P99 donated by Klaus, was still securely tucked inside his jacket, and no one said anything else as Rufus parked the truck and the three of them piled out and trooped up to the front door. The brothers let Rufus take the lead, however, and stayed two steps behind him as he knocked on the door.

A curtain on one of the front windows twitched briefly, and shortly thereafter the locks clacked and the door creaked open slightly to reveal part of a grumpy, grizzled face. "I agreed to meet with _you_ , Turner," the man, presumably Elkins, said. "Didn't say I'd meet with those greenhorns you got trailing you."

"Ain't exactly greenhorns," Rufus shot back before either brother could object. "They're John Winchester's boys."

"He send you?"

"No, sir," Sam spoke up. "Dad disappeared six weeks ago, and Dean hadn't heard from him for three weeks before that. He doesn't know we're here."

One skeptical blue eye gave both Sam and Dean a searching once-over, and then the door opened far enough for them to see Elkins properly—but not, Sam noted, far enough to be an invitation to come in. "What do you want?" Elkins demanded.

"The Colt," Rufus replied.

Elkins scoffed. "What makes you think I have any idea what you're talking about?"

"We have it on good authority that you don't just know what we mean," Dean replied, slipping into his Fed voice. "Your great-grandfather got the gun from Samuel Colt after it was used to kill a phoenix in Sunrise, Wyoming, in March of 1861."

Elkins' face wasn't exactly tan, but it paled further when Dean mentioned Sunrise. "Who told you that? What authority?"

"Colt's journal... and the Men of Letters."

Elkins' eyes widened. "The Men of Letters are _dead!_ "

"Not anymore," Sam stated. "We're legacies."

Elkins swallowed hard. "Doesn't mean you're entitled to my gun."

"No, it doesn't," Dean admitted. "But it does mean we have the resources to offer a trade." And he pulled the Walther out of his jacket, keeping his fingers clearly below the trigger guard.

"This gun was blessed by the Warrior Queen of Indochina," Sam explained. "With consecrated iron rounds, it will kill anything short of an Alpha or one of the upper echelons of demons. That's why we can't use it ourselves—our mother was killed by one of the Princes of Hell, and only the Colt or the First Blade has the power to kill those."

"And even if we knew where the First Blade was, it's useless without the Mark of Cain. No way in hell any of us is willing to go that route."

Elkins frowned. "Consecrated iron. No other limitations?"

"No, sir," the brothers chorused.

Elkins hesitated a moment, then held out his hand. "Let me see it."

Dean handed him the gun, but Sam suddenly felt uneasy. That discomfort grew as Elkins turned the gun over in his hands a couple of times, and a quick glance at Dean told Sam that Dean was on his guard as well. Rufus still seemed relaxed, but Sam hadn't yet learned to read him as easily as he could read Bobby.

"P99's a good model," Rufus observed casually. "Semi-auto, has three times the mag capacity of an 1830s revolver."

"And it's _new_ ," Elkins added. "This gun can't be more than nine years old; the model was just launched in '96. It's been almost thirty years since we pulled out of Vietnam."

Dean shrugged. "Like I said. We've got resources."

Elkins tested the weight of the gun in his left hand, then shifted it to his right... and aimed it over Rufus' shoulder at Sam. Sam gulped involuntarily.

"Elkins, what the _hell?!_ " Rufus yelped.

"Been hearing rumors about this boy," Elkins stated. "And I don't have a better target to test your claim."

"Mr. Elkins, I'm human," Sam returned, surprising himself with how steady his voice was. "I can take any test you want—salt, silver, holy water."

"No deal."

"But if your goal is to test whether the gun works on monsters, shouldn't you make sure your target's not human before you shoot?"

"I've fired the Colt before. I know what the shot looks like when it hits a non-human."

"What, you're willing to risk killing one of _John Winchester's sons_ just to prove a point?!"

"You're not John Winchester's son," Elkins snarled and put his finger on the trigger.

And Dean snarled back—in Enochian. Elkins' eyes flew wide as the spell took hold, freezing his voluntary muscles before he could pull the trigger.

"It's a temporary spell, Mr. Elkins," Dean explained as Rufus extricated the Walther from Elkins' grasp and handed it to Sam, who secured it in a shoulder holster he'd worn just in case. "We'll reverse it as soon as we've closed the door. But for the record, you're dead wrong about Sam. He _is_ Dad's son, and he _is_ human."

Rufus pushed the door all the way open, squeezed past Elkins, and hauled him back far enough that he wouldn't be hit by the closing door. That done, Rufus locked the handle and came back outside, closing the door behind him. Sam then uttered the reversal spell... and heard a groan and splash as a few too many of Elkins' muscles relaxed. Oops. That hadn't happened when they'd practiced with Ardsley and Van; then again, Elkins was much older than they were.

"C'mon," Rufus urged, and the three of them dashed back to the truck. Dean raised a shield around the truck as they got in and Rufus got turned around, but they were already out of range by the time Elkins finally opened the door again and fired his shotgun after them.

Rufus was still laughing half a mile later, when he pulled over and stopped at a pre-arranged point. Zeetha came out from behind a tree, grinning and brandishing a soft-sided handgun case. Dean opened his door, and she handed him the case, which he passed to Sam. Then she took Dean's hand and stepped up onto the running board and into Dean.

Sam waited until the merged couple had closed the passenger door and Rufus had started driving again to ask, "Any problems?"

"Nope," replied a higher version of Dean's voice, though the grin and the answer were all Zeetha. "Place is barely warded; he's got salt lines, but the safe's not even made of cold iron. It's in a secret room, but it's not like _that_ was hard to find. And the tumblers aren't even silenced!"

"Any trouble matchin' the appearance?" Rufus asked as Sam unzipped the case. "He said he's fired it before."

"No, it was already pretty close, just had to add a few tweaks. There are five rounds left; I put 'em all in the cylinder."

Sam pulled the Colt out of the case, checked the cylinder, and nodded. It did indeed look considerably like the antique Colt they'd charmed Thursday night with the rest of the arsenal; Bobby had located it in St. Louis and had had Tarvek and Colette pick it up on their way back from the hunt in Pennsylvania. That was another case where Dean had been right, much to Sam's annoyance. Jerry's problem had turned out to be a chaos-causing demon that had been crashing aircraft, and while the Murphys had been able to save one particularly crowded flight and send the demon back to Hell, Tarvek had reported that the demon had taunted _him_ about the plan for Sam and about Jess having a target on her back. Tarvek hadn't let it rattle him, but Sam could just imagine how much worse matters would have been if Dean hadn't sent the Murphys instead of trying to make the trip themselves. Plus, they likely wouldn't have been able to go back to St. Louis for the gun if the shifter hunt had gone as sideways for the Winchesters as it had for the Murphys, if not worse—the shifter had caught Tarvek and shifted into his form before Colette and Violetta had killed it, and only Pastor Jim's intervention had convinced the police that the shifter wasn't Tarvek himself. Violetta had actually been glad to go back to school afterward.

"I'm sure glad you didn't take long to make the switch," Sam admitted as he put the Colt back in the case and zipped it up. "I don't know how long we could have kept stalling if Dean had had to go with the shield. I mean, if Elkins was willing to shoot me over the rumors he's heard about me being the Boy King of Hell or whatever, he'd probably be even quicker to shoot Dean for actually manifesting powers."

"Yeah, I know." A left arm with more bulk than Sam was used to feeling slid over his shoulders in a jostling side hug, the unexpected hardness of Zeetha's arm ring beneath Dean's jacket just missing Sam's spine and their green hair brushing his ear. "I woulda stepped in if I'd had to. But hey, all's well that ends well. We got what we were after, didn't even have to lie to him about it, and still left him with virtually the same level of protection he started with even though he didn't take the trade. Plus, we both think he deserved the humiliation!"

Sam huffed and smiled, and his conjoined sibling—Zean? Deetha? He still didn't know what to call them in this state—tugged on his shoulders again to prompt him to rest his head on their shoulder. He did so and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, waking only when they arrived at the hotel in Denver.

* * *

Dean had _not_ missed the winters in Kansas (or anything else about Kansas, for that matter, although Lebanon wasn't as uncomfortable as Lawrence would have been). No sooner had their party returned from Colorado, about the same time Klaus got back from dealing with a Bloody Mary sighting in Toledo, than the weather turned nasty. They got several inches of freezing rain followed by several feet of snow, which pretty well killed any notion of going after Sinclair before Christmas. And the ten-day forecast called for continued bitter cold and more snow.

So instead everyone settled in for what Theo dubbed the "First Annual Stanford Adventure Club (and Friends) Winter Holiday Extravaganza," which ran more or less non-stop from the solstice to the end of Hanukkah on January 2. Common consensus put Ardsley in charge of the drinks, despite Theo having been the one to do most of the planning, so there weren't as many drunken shenanigans as one might have expected; but Tarvek pointed out that there was too much potential for something to go disastrously wrong in a place like the bunker if everyone didn't stay at least moderately sober, and everyone agreed with him. Theo had originally planned to extend the celebrations through Epiphany, but even Zeetha was about partied out after New Year's Eve, so they toned down the last night of Hanukkah even further and took the rest of the week to recover. The roads were still too treacherous for travel in any case.

The added downtime also gave the whole group time to review the assault plan, pick it apart, put it back together again, and decide for sure who was going and who wasn't. Van needed to get his immigration paperwork done ASAP, so Ardsley and Sleipnir were staying to help him with that while Colette kept working on updating the bunker's computer system and Tarvek, Theo, and Jess overhauled the infirmary. Dean suspected Jess also wanted to do some research of her own into Sam's condition, but neither of them said anything about it. All four Winchesters were needed for the assault, though, as were all four Wulfenbachs, and Bobby and Rufus opted to tag along for extra backup. Thus, when the roads were finally clear enough for travel on January 9, only four vehicles left the Bunker's garage: the Impala, Gil's HHR, Klaus' truck, and Bobby's Chevelle. Klaus and Zanta would have ridden with Gil and Agatha, but the boxes of bots and firewood took up most of the HHR's cargo area even with the seats folded down, and Zanta had a feeling they might need the truck anyway.

The plan, as far as it went, was fairly straightforward. Everyone but the Winchesters would stop about half a mile from Sinclair's mansion and wait while the Winchesters went in. Since Henry actually knew Sinclair, of course, he would be in the lead and take Sam with him, under the pretext of Sam wanting to get out of hunting and join the Men of Letters. Dean and Zeetha would tag along invisibly. Once they merged for the purpose, Zanta placed them under two spells; one hid them not only from mortal sight but also from any form of magical detection Sinclair might try to use to discover them, and the other bound them to Sam so they wouldn't be separated by whatever spell Sinclair used to let Sam and Henry into the mansion. Both spells would break the moment Dean and Zeetha unmerged. Sam and Henry were to get Sinclair chatting and off his guard long enough for Dean and Zeetha to take him out. Then, either Dean or Zeetha, or both, would signal Gil through the merge-link that the coast was clear and find a way to let at least Zanta into the mansion; the other Wulfenbachs and Bobby and Rufus would then follow to back the Winchesters up in whatever fight the monsters from Sinclair's menagerie put up. After that, Agatha would deploy her bots, and Klaus, Bobby, and Rufus would take charge of cleaning up the corpses while Zanta reworked the wards, as she had done at the bunker, so that only she and those who bore her seal could enter. That would allow the Adventure Club and trusted friends in but keep Zola, and any other Mongfishes aside from Agatha and Theo, out.

It was a simple, clear-cut plan, and Dean was still nine kinds of nervous about it as the small caravan made its way toward the area of southern Missouri where Sinclair's mansion stood. The fact that he'd had to merge with Zeetha and get cloaked before they left and that therefore _Henry_ was driving didn't help at all. Granted, Henry knew how to get where they were going, and it should look better to Sinclair for Henry to be the one behind the wheel. But while Dean had grown comfortable enough with Henry to trust him with both his own life and Sam's, he still wasn't sure he trusted Henry with Baby.

The fact that Henry somehow managed to find the one oldies station in the tri-state area that still played _Pat Boone_ didn't help, either, but rules were rules. Driver picked the music, and even though Dean wasn't in shotgun, he still shut his cakehole. That didn't mean he—or Zeetha, for that matter—had to like it.

Apart from the radio, though, the car was quiet, and that was making Zeetha nervous. So it came as a relief to both Dean and Zeetha when, about an hour down the road, Sam looked at Henry and asked, "Are you okay?"

"No," Henry admitted quietly. "Not really."

Sam nodded a little. "Want to talk about it?"

Henry didn't answer for a moment. Then he sighed. "It's not that I'm having second thoughts or anything like that. Even if... if he's not in league with Lucrezia or Zola to the extent we suspect he is, he still... he-he went off the rails fifty, sixty years ago, and if he's been alone all this time, it's probably only gotten worse. In my head, I know that. I know he can't be trusted; I know whatever he's been doing has to be stopped. I just... don't know if my acting skills are up to the job."

"Because you're still thinking of him as a friend or because you're afraid you'll let on how betrayed you feel?"

"Both." Then Henry huffed. "Plus, Cuthbert _knows_ me. He's worked with me on cases before."

"But it's been fifty years, nearly, since he saw you last. That knowledge won't be as fresh as if we were doing this in '58."

"Yes, but for me, it's only been a couple of months. I went to visit him just a week before my initiation." Henry took one hand off the wheel to run over his face.

Dean reached forward to squeeze Henry's shoulder. "Tell ya what. We'll give him a chance to prove us and the file wrong. If you can talk him around, get him on our side, fine—he can live. He makes one move against you an' Sammy, he's dead."

Henry drew a deep, ragged breath and nodded. "Fair enough. Thank you." Then he paused. "That _was_ Dean, right?"

"I didn't hear anything," Sam deadpanned.

Dean smacked him upside the head, which actually got Henry to laugh and sparked a lively discussion of what exactly they should call Dean and Zeetha while merged. "DZ" stuck, but the suggestion of led to some detours—"Dizzy," "DFZ," "Zanuck," "the Supreme Commander" (that was Zeetha's favorite)—and "Dizzy" in turn prompted some reminiscences from Henry about the Gashouse Gang and an off-the-cuff rendition of "Who's on First" between Henry and Sam, which made Zeetha laugh so hard she nearly fell out of the merge.** That got them by until lunch at a diner, when DZ had to wait in the car to avoid freaking out the civilians, but Henry and Sam went in with the rest of the group and came out with a burger for DZ and a laughter-filled recounting of Klaus, Bobby, and Rufus giving each other grief over the course of the entire meal. That prompted Sam and Dean to tell enough funny stories to occupy most of the rest of the drive down. But silence fell again about half an hour from their destination, and this time no one felt like breaking it.

"They should stop here," Henry finally announced, and Dean relayed that to Gil, who was second in line behind the Impala. Gil acknowledged him mentally and turned off, as did Klaus and Bobby behind him. And Henry, praying under his breath, drove on to what looked like an empty clearing and parked.

DZ teleported out of the car, their skin crawling from the spells that hung in the air like cobwebs. They could _almost_ make out the vast fortress in front of them, a vague impression of some sort of cross between San Simeon and Biltmore looming behind a blank, imposing wall... but the fact that it was _not quite_ visible made it even creepier. This was exactly the sort of place one did not want to stumble across on a dark and stormy night, and with the winter sun heading toward the horizon and a cloud bank off to the west, they might well wind up with a dark and stormy night before all was said and done.

Dean almost wished they'd added Gil and Agatha to the merge. He had a really bad feeling about this job.

Before he could dwell on it too long, however, Henry and Sam got out of the car. While Sam came around the front of the car, Henry called, "Cuthbert? Anybody home? It's Henry—Henry Winchester. I've got my grandson Sam with me; he wants to join the Letters. Thought I should introduce you."

There was a tense pause, and then smoke rolled up from the ground in front of them to form a sort of doorway full of swirling smoke and light. Henry looked at Sam, nodded, and started forward toward the portal. Sam blew the air out of his cheeks and waited just long enough for DZ to grab one of his belt loops before following.

They came out in a very ritzy hallway—hardwood floors with Persian rugs, creamy plaster walls hung with expensive paintings in between mahogany wainscoting and pilasters, the odd suit of armor or decoratively-displayed sword here and there. Henry led the way past the foot of the stairs toward one of the doorways, but no sooner had they turned the corner than there was a noise behind them, and they spun to find themselves facing two human-looking creatures, one male and one female, both of which bared teeth that had an extra set of long, sharp... well, _fangs_ that shot out from the gums to rest in front of their human teeth.

 _Vampires!_ Zeetha gasped.

Dean started to reach for the Colt; Zeetha started to reach for her swords. That conflicting instinct held them up just long enough to remember that they weren't supposed to reveal their presence yet and also for Sam and Henry to draw the machetes that Sam had insisted they carry just in case.

"Heads!" Henry barked, and that was all the instruction Sam needed. One short fight later, both vampires had been duly beheaded, and Sam was checking his own neck to make sure the female hadn't actually succeeded in drawing blood when she tried to bite him.

"You all right?" he asked Henry.

Henry nodded. "Thanks. You?"

"Will be."

Before they could converse further, they were interrupted by applause from behind them. They turned again to see a smiling dark-haired man in a dapper grey suit coming out of the sitting room.

" _Very_ well done," the newcomer—Sinclair?—said with evident approval. "You see, Henry? All that combat training really wasn't a waste of time."

Henry stared. "Cuthbert, what on _earth_..."

"Wanted to see what Sam here was made of. Also wanted to make sure you hadn't gotten rusty in your old age."

"Old age?! I actually missed the last forty-eight years, unlike some people I could name."

Sinclair, who didn't look a day over 40, laughed and ushered Sam and Henry into the sitting room. DZ ducked in first to make sure there wasn't another ambush waiting in there, but there wasn't, just lots of leather furniture and dark wood and a roaring fire in the marble fireplace. Still, there was also a fair amount of esoterica in the room, not least of which was the end table next to the leather easy chair that was covered in silver pots and shallow copper dishes heaped with powders of various sorts. Zeetha recognized some of them as herbs used in spell-casting.

 _What happens if we dump 'em all in the fire?_ Dean asked, skirting around to stand behind the couch while Sinclair offered Sam and Henry drinks from a mid-century cherry bar.

 _I honestly don't know_ , Zeetha admitted. _It could be harmless; it could explode. We should probably leave that for Mom to dispose of._

"I have to say," Sinclair noted as Sam and Henry sat down on the couch with their drinks, "it is really strange to hear someone call me by that moniker again."

"You're still going by 'Magnus'?" Henry asked.

"Well, hell, with the librarians gone, there was no one to challenge me." Sinclair fixed his own Scotch on the rocks and came over to sit down in the chair, then looked at Henry, chuckled, and shook his head. "Henry Winchester. Of all the people to turn up out of the blue! Where've you been, kid? I thought you'd been killed in the fire back in '58."

"I managed to get out before the fire started. Used the Enochian time-travel spell, except... I must have done something wrong somehow. I was trying to reach John, and instead I wound up in Palo Alto with Sam."

Sinclair's eyebrows shot up, and he turned to Sam. "Palo Alto? Stanford?"

Sam nodded. "Yes, sir. I was pre-law, trying to get out of the family business."

"Family business?"

"Hunting."

Sinclair guffawed. "Little Johnny Winchester, a big bad hunter! Man, the old boys must be spinning in their graves!"

Sam cleared his throat. "Actually, sir, Dad went missing on a hunt at the end of October. My brother and his wife are still trying to locate him."

"Oh. Well, I'm sorry to hear that." But Sinclair was still smirking and didn't sound sorry at all.

"I don't think that news is what caused the heart attack that killed Larry Ganem right after he gave me the coordinates to the bunker," Henry noted, which was true.

Sinclair blinked. "Bunker? Which bunker?"

"The one in Kansas. When Abaddon attacked us, Larry shoved the key into my hand and told me to keep it safe. That's why I jumped. Sam and I managed to track him down in November to get the rest of the story, but Larry wouldn't believe me that I'd managed to block Abaddon from following me and trap her between dimensions. We were arguing about it when..." Henry broke off and ran a shaking hand over his mouth.

"It wasn't your fault," Sam stated. "A massive coronary like that could happen at any time. I'm just glad it didn't hit until after he'd given us the coordinates."

Sinclair frowned. "Wait, if you've got the key to the kingdom, why did you come here? I mean, I'm glad to see you and all, but..."

Henry pulled himself together with a deep breath. "Well, I... I wanted Sam to meet you, like I said. I told him you have an incredible collection."

Sinclair smirked again. "Greatest collection of supernatural rarities and antiquities on the planet. I am going to miss those two from my zoo, but hell, plenty of vampires left in the world—although hunters have done a remarkable job of thinning the herd."

If Dean hadn't hated Sinclair before, he definitely did now.

"Yeah, you know," Sinclair went on, "I kept telling those boys, 'We could end this. We could rid the world of monsters if we really put our minds to it.' But no, they always said, 'That's not our place. We're here to study, to catalogue.'"

"Study does have its uses," Sam replied.

"So it does." Sinclair leaned forward. "But that's not really why you're here, is it, Henry?"

Henry sighed. "No, it isn't. We need your help. Azazel placed Sam under a blood curse when he was six months old, and so far, we haven't been able to find a way to reverse it."

Sinclair sat back again and steepled his fingers. "Hm. Interesting. Tricky." His eyes narrowed as he studied Sam and Henry, and DZ, now on high alert, edged around the couch to stand in front of the fireplace, ready to strike.

After a tense pause, Sam asked, "Do you happen to know of a spell that could help, or..."

"Yeah, I think I do know of a spell. Let me try this."

Sinclair stood without making a move toward the end table. Rather, he stepped forward and leaned across the coffee table to put one hand each on Sam's and Henry's heads. Then he uttered a short Latin phrase that neither Dean nor Zeetha quite understood—and to their horror, Sam and Henry slumped back in their seats, limbs limp, faces slack, and eyes glazed and vacant.

"Interesting effect, isn't it?" Sinclair said with a chuckle and straightened. "All thought, all will, just... drains right out of you. Oh, don't worry, it'll wear off after a while, but I do this enough, you'll be ready for whatever plans I make for you."

Zeetha reached for her swords but stopped short of drawing them.

"I don't think I'll have much trouble with you, Henry," Sinclair went on. "You're smart enough to understand what I have to offer; I expect you to see reason and aid me willingly, especially for your grandsons' sake. Even if you don't, though... one way or another, I'll make you the perfect assistant for me. As for you, Sam, what am I going to do with you? The Boy King of Hell handing himself to me on a silver platter?"

 _Gil! GIL!_ Dean thought desperately, but the link wouldn't connect beyond the fortress walls.

Sinclair chuckled again. "You know, I've heard all about you from Zola. Not that I approve of her joining forces with Azazel, any more than I approved of Lucrezia's doing so in the '70s, but I will admit to teaching both of them all they know. Demonica was a witch, too, of course, but she stopped talking to me after I missed Lucrezia's funeral. Still, you could be very valuable to me." He reached forward again to caress Sam's cheek. "Once we unlock all those arcane powers Azazel's blood gives you..."

"Nnn," Sam groaned. "Nnnnnnnnnn..."

"Oh, you don't understand, Sam. I'm not asking for your cooperation. I'm taking it. But I'm willing to let you both sleep on it first. _Dormite!_ "***

With a sigh, both Sam and Henry fell asleep instantly. With a yell, Zeetha drew her swords, charged forward out of the merge, and ran Sinclair through as Dean drew the Colt.

Sinclair coughed in surprise but didn't turn. "Heh. Surely... you know... that's not... not enough... to kill me."

"No," Dean replied and cocked the gun as Sinclair whipped his head around to look at him. "But this is."

Sinclair started to raise his right hand, but Zeetha twisted the sword in his chest, and as he screamed, Dean fired, hitting him right between the eyes. The wound flared with blue light, and as Zeetha jerked the sword out again, Sinclair fell and died.

And Sam and Henry stayed asleep.

Dean and Zeetha swore in stereo, but there was no time to figure out how to break the spell. Running footsteps in the hall announced the impending arrival of the zoo. Dean holstered the Colt with his right hand while drawing the Walther with his left, and Zeetha swiped her sword over Sinclair's suit coat to get the blood off before sheathing both swords and drawing the shotgun she'd started carrying over the sheaths. Dean had just enough time to draw his M1911 with his right hand before the monsters arrived. Between them, Dean and Zeetha managed to clear a path to the doorway, where they made their stand, knowing there was no other entrance to the room and the warding neutralized any sort of teleportation powers, so nothing could sneak in behind them. Dean couldn't even raise a shield. Still, standing right behind Zeetha and firing in both directions at once while she focused on whatever was coming down the stairs, he wasn't _too_ worried about being able to hold them off until Zanta and Gil could find their way in. But he did find himself praying that somebody had done a better job than he had of memorizing the entry spell Sinclair had proposed for the updated warding on the bunker.

The first wave had just about died down when the rest of the hunters materialized in the hall with a flash; Gil and Agatha were carrying boxes of bots, and the others all had weapons drawn. Murmuring a Tamil expression of relief, Zeetha lowered her shotgun.

"Oh, thank God," Gil sighed, setting down his box. "I thought we'd lost you."

"Place is warded damn tight," Dean admitted and holstered the Walther. "Think it even neutralized all the protections on Sammy an' Henry."

"Let me see," Zanta ordered, and Dean and Zeetha got out of her way. "What spell did Sinclair use?"

"Some sort of will-draining spell," Zeetha replied. "It was in Latin. And then he ordered them to sleep."

Zanta checked Henry's pulse and eyes, then Sam's. "They will wake in about ten minutes, but we must expect another assault before then unless we strike first. Agatha?"

Agatha's eyes glowed blue, and at her verbal command, her bots swarmed out of the boxes and sped off through the halls and up the stairs. One small fleet of scanner bots flew into the sitting room ahead of Agatha, who pulled a laptop out of her box and brought it in to set on the coffee table. Zanta magicked Sinclair out of the way and cleaned up the blood on the floor so Agatha wouldn't get her shoes dirty. But Agatha was fully focused on the information streaming in from the bots, which started appearing on the laptop screen as soon as she got logged in.

And seconds after that, the explosions began.

Gil and Klaus came into the sitting room. "Honey," Klaus began, "we need..."

"To start on the pyre before it gets any later," Zanta finished for him. "I know." She looked around as if she were feeling out the wards, then carried the table of spell powders out into the hall, followed by Klaus; Dean and Zeetha followed as far as the sitting room door. There was a niche with a throne-type chair at the far end, and Zanta took the table down to it, pulled a vial of something-or-other out of her pocket, and mixed it with one dish of powder while Klaus moved the chair out of the way. She smeared the resulting paste around the edge of the niche and issued some kind of command, and the niche turned into a glowing doorway. "There," she said. "That portal is stable and will remain open until I order it to close."

"Thanks," Klaus said and kissed her cheek. "Gil?"

Gil nodded and helped Klaus pick up one corpse to cart out, and Bobby and Rufus followed with another. Zanta stayed next to the portal, murmuring something Dean couldn't hear.

 _Help with cleanup?_ Zeetha asked Dean mentally.

Dean shook his head. _Not 'til Sammy's awake._

Zeetha nodded and resumed guarding the sitting room door, and Dean dodged a scanner bot and sat down on the couch between his brother and grandfather. After a moment, he put one arm around Sam's shoulders, and Sam instinctively leaned over to put his head on Dean's shoulder. Agatha, meanwhile, was still tracking the progress of her bots and issuing mental commands; the glow in her eyes had mostly faded, but every so often she would murmur or mouth something, and Dean would hear or sense a distant explosion.

"Finding much?" he asked after a few minutes.

"Artifacts," she replied. "Have to check with Colette once we get the network established, see what's safe to keep, what we need to destroy. Or ask Mum"—that was the name she'd settled on for Zanta, since for her, _Mom_ meant Judy and _Mother_ meant Lucrezia. "So far, no monsters worth saving, no captive humans."

Just then, Sam startled awake and gasped, "Dean!"

"Right here, dude," Dean assured him. "We got 'im."

Sam looked around wildly for a moment before relaxing against Dean again with a sigh of relief.

Agatha glanced up from the laptop long enough to give Sam a smile. "Welcome back, Sam."

Sam nodded. "Thanks."

Then Henry jerked awake with a yelp of "NO!"

"Hey, hey, Henry," Dean replied, putting his other arm around Henry's shoulders. "It's okay. We're okay."

"No..." Henry put a hand to his head. "Cuthbert—he was—"

"I was right here, remember? Saw the whole thing. But we got 'im. He's dead."

Henry's eyes closed, and he let out a shuddering sigh. "So Sam's safe."

"Relatively speaking," Sam answered dryly.

" _You_ okay?" Dean asked.

Henry took a deep breath and nodded. "I will be."

Before the conversation could continue, a scanner bot zipped into the room over Zeetha's head, dinging insistently at Agatha.

Startled, Agatha looked up at it. "What? What is it?"

 _Ding! Ding! Dingdingdingding!_ The bot backed up in several quick jerks, as if urging her to follow.

Agatha jumped up from the chair and ran after the bot, and the Winchesters chased after her. The bot led them up several flights of stairs and through a maze of halls that stank of ozone and charred flesh before finally stopping to hover in one dimly lit doorway. The room beyond was sparsely furnished, containing only a chair, a nightstand with only a lamp and a pair of glasses on it, and a queen-sized bed on which lay a stocky man with disheveled brown hair. He was so tangled in the sheets that Dean couldn't see much more than his pasty, sweaty face, but he looked like he felt like hell, and the pupils of his glassy, panic-wide eyes were so blown that Dean couldn't tell what color the irises were.

"No," the man moaned. "No, no more, not again, _please..._ "

Agatha gasped. "Uncle Barry?!"

* * *

.

* * *

* Idiot (lit. "Gentile head")

** Jay Hanna "Dizzy" Dean was the ace pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1930s, part of the 1934 World Series-winning squad affectionately known as the Gashouse Gang. "DFZ" was Darryl F. Zanuck, founder of 20th Century Fox, who became known as "the Supreme Commander" (the same title given to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower when he was put in charge of Operation Overlord, better known as D-Day) while he was producing _The Longest Day_ , a docudrama about Overlord. _The Longest Day_ came out in 1962, so Henry wouldn't have seen it before he jumped, but I'm sure Dean's seen it a million times. And if you've never seen the Abbott and Costello routine "Who's on First," look it up on YouTube—but don't drink anything while you watch it!

*** Sleep!


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: Readers triggered by even oblique discussions of abuse and mind control may want to skip Barry's story in the first part of this chapter. (Search for "Bobby" to find the safest point to pick up.)

* * *

Chapter 6

"Twenty-two years," a much cleaner and more coherent Barry Sanders repeated half an hour later and shook his head as Sam handed him a cup of coffee. "I thought maybe it had been as many as ten, but... it's really 2006?"

Klaus nodded and sat down to Barry's left at the mansion's kitchen table. "Really."

Barry sighed and turned to Agatha, who sat to his right. "Agatha, I'm _so_ sorry. I never meant to miss your entire childhood."

"It's okay, Uncle Barry," Agatha assured him, rubbing his wrist gently as Zeetha rubbed Agatha's shoulder. "Mom and Dad gave me the best childhood I could ever have hoped for."

Barry smiled sadly, then looked across the table at Gil and brightened. "Don't think I could have picked you a better husband, either," he said and shakily raised his mug in salute.

Gil chuckled and accepted his own mug of coffee from Dean, who sat down beside him. "Thank you, sir," Gil said to Barry. "Are you sure you don't want us to heal you the rest of the way?"

Barry took a drink of coffee and nodded. "Quite sure. I do appreciate the offer, but I'd rather be healed by mortal medicine for a change."

"Ah, sure, I understand."

"That raises a question, though, Agatha. There's something I found out the hard way when I first got here."

"About the Heterodynes?" Agatha asked.

Barry blinked. "You know?"

Agatha nodded. "Kinda found out the hard way ourselves, at least about the powers, but Grandma Teodora told Mom the whole story before she died."

Barry sighed heavily.

"Mom said she didn't believe it at the time, and Grandma Teodora didn't want her to tell you or my father anyway. She still blames herself for his death, though."

Barry shook his head. "I don't think knowing it then would have changed anything. Bill might have been more wary of Lucrezia's motives, but he might have married her anyway. As it was, I tried to talk him out of proposing, but she'd sworn up and down she would change, and he believed her." Then he looked at Klaus again. "Speaking of Lucrezia, where the devil did _you_ come from? Last I heard, you were missing, presumed dead."

"Time enough for that story on the way to the hospital in Grand Rapids," Klaus replied with a bit of a smile.

"Grand Rapids? Why?"

"War buddy of mine, a Dr. Sun, runs it. He's one of Zanta's people, and he's the best person I know to deal with whatever's going on with you without resorting to magic."

Barry dragged a trembling hand down his face. "Expect it'll take us a couple of days to get up there. Withdrawal's likely to be even worse by then—I may not be in any fit state to tell him what happened. Don't even remember half of it, anyway."

Sam sat down next to Dean. "Withdrawal? You mean Sinclair used drugs?"

Barry frowned in confusion. "Sinclair?"

"Magnus," Dean supplied. "His real name was Cuthbert Sinclair."

"Oh. Uh. Yes, he... maybe I'd better start at the beginning. But Agatha, I don't know if you want to hear this."

"I do," Agatha stated. "It may be upsetting, but I want to know."

Barry sighed. "All right. Well, I'd been investigating Lucrezia's coven, as I'm sure Adam and Judy have told you by now. I started hearing rumblings about this guy called Magnus, who'd given them some information, and... long story short, after a couple of years, I managed to force one of the witches to give me directions on how to get here and how to let myself in. I had no idea what I was in for. Magnus caught me almost immediately, put me under some kind of truth spell. I tried to fight it, but... he finally got enough out of me to work out who I was. That's when he told me I wouldn't be leaving. Apparently he'd... met my biological father during the war and... wanted to add me to his collection."

Sam and Dean hissed.

"I managed to grab one of the swords and try to kill him, but he used a spell to make the sword too hot to hold, and then he put his hand on my head and hit me with another spell that, uh, drains the will."

Sam nodded. "He used that on me, too. You can't even feel scared because you can't feel anything at all."

"Yeah. That's exactly what it's like." Barry took a long drink of coffee and a deep breath. "Downstairs, in the basement, there's a pool that's fed by an underground spring. Magnus ordered some of his pets to carry me down there, strip me, and... put me in the pool. Said he wanted to see what would happen."

Gil, Agatha, and Zeetha hissed at that.

"It... it was like being plugged into a light socket or grabbing hold of a downed power line. Just raw power surging through me and... and I couldn't even try to control it because of the spell. I killed every monster that came near me. I don't know how I managed not to kill Magnus, but... he told me once he knew a spell for everything. But everything else... I don't even know how many there were."

 _Von Blitzengaard_ , Dean, Zeetha, and Gil thought at the same time, and Dean was sure that Sam, Klaus, and Agatha had all had the same thought, too. Assuming von Blitzengaard had been in business already by the time Barry broke into this place, Sinclair's 'pets' would have been considerably more expendable than they were now—and the Winchesters had already seen how expendable they had been to Sinclair now.

Barry swallowed hard. "This next part's... not really fit for mixed company, Agatha."

"You don't have to shield me, Uncle Barry," Agatha insisted. "Things got pretty wild on our wedding night; I think I understand."

Barry blushed but took another deep breath and looked down at his coffee. "That kind of experience does... have an effect on a man. The lightning storm had just calmed down when this... I don't know... fish-woman swam up to me and... and... b-by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late."

"Oh, _Barry_ ," Klaus breathed.

"I... I think maybe Magnus thought— _that_ —would calm me down, but it didn't work. I killed her, too. I think there were two or three more before I finally blacked out. They all died."

Agatha put her head on Barry's shoulder and hugged his arm.

A tear rolled down Barry's cheek as he sucked in another deep breath. "After that, Magnus didn't risk putting me under the will-draining spell again. We both knew it was too dangerous. Even with the way the wards dampen everything, if I lost control again, I... could do even worse damage than I had the first time. So instead he started drugging me, getting me drunk, that sort of thing. Most of the time he rotated among several different options to prevent me from building up a tolerance to anything, but... sometimes he'd let me get hooked on one thing for a while and then take it away, either until I started complying with his wishes again or until he'd studied the effects to his satisfaction. If it was something like weed or cocaine that he couldn't just inject me with or put in my food, he'd come up with some sort of leverage to make me take it. And when things... started getting bad or he needed my mind clear to get my assistance with something, he'd hit me with a healing spell." He took off his glasses. "Guess that's why my prescription hasn't changed in all these years."

"Did he experiment on you?" Klaus asked.

Barry nodded. "And the worst was... he tried to use me in his breeding pool."

 _Everyone_ at the table hissed.

"The only good news is that whatever reproductive problems Mom had, or maybe my biological father, they apparently got passed down to me. Magnus hit me with every fertility spell and potion he could find, but I never fathered a child."

"That is a mercy," Klaus agreed. "We've had to put the whole menagerie down. Most of the monsters tried to attack us, and the few that didn't begged us to kill them because they knew they'd start killing humans if they left."

"Mm. I can understand that. I know I've got a long way to go to get over all this."

"Well, we'll get you to Sun as soon as we can. That'll be a start."

"And actually," Gil chimed in, "Agatha and I need someone to watch our house in Beetleburg for a while. We may be gone for a year or more. If you wouldn't mind house-sitting for us once you get out of the hospital..."

"It's only a few minutes away from Mom and Dad's house," Agatha added. "Close to our church, too, so that would get you some spiritual relief. And we have friends at Harvelle's Roadhouse as well; they're hunters."

"Church," Barry said wistfully. "I haven't been to church in so long... might actually make me start feeling like a human again instead of... well, whatever I am now."

"You're human enough, my friend," Klaus stated and squeezed Barry's shoulder. "Human enough."

Before anyone could figure out what to say next, there was a knock on the doorframe, and Bobby came in. "We're just about done," he announced. "Just have to put Sinclair on the pile. Thought maybe Mr. Sanders here might like to light the pyre."

Barry blinked and put his glasses back on. "Pyre?"

"Hunter's funeral," Dean explained. "Salt 'em and burn 'em so they can't come back or haunt anything."

"Of course," Sam noted, "since we shot him with the Colt, his spirit should already be permanently severed from his remains."

"Yeah, but we know Lucrezia was into hardcore necromancy, and if he wasn't lyin' about teaching her all she knew..."

"No sense in taking chances, right."

Barry looked at Klaus again. "I don't know how long I'll be able to stand."

"I'll help you," Klaus promised.

Barry nodded. "Then yes, I... I think I would like to light that fire."

* * *

As she drove through the deepening twilight toward her grandfather's fortress, Zola Malfeazium sniffled and immediately kicked herself for it. She wasn't going to cry _again_ , dammit—she'd been crying off and on for the better part of four days, although deciding Saturday morning to make this trip had helped a little, but all crying ever did was make her tired and grumpy. It didn't solve anything, and since she'd hit the limit of what even her outstanding improvisational skills could do, an actual solution was what she needed. That's why she was coming to Grandpa's.

She knew she'd gotten too emotionally involved. Maman and Grand-père Mongfish had warned her even before she'd left Paris in '98. Grand-père had been happier about her service to Azazel than Maman or Grandpa had been, true, but even he had warned Zola not to believe that her infernal partner could ever truly love her. But somehow she'd ended up falling for him and believed her demon lover when he'd said the feeling was mutual. She'd even gone so far as to keep Brady on ice while her lover was Downstairs, plying the poor stooge with love potions and giving him everything he wanted just to keep him on her leash once he was out of the hospital.

And then, Thursday morning, her lover had returned to re-possess Brady. It wasn't until after the initial passion of their reunion had died down that he'd informed her that he wasn't working for Azazel anymore. His assignment had always been temporary, and especially after his failure to kill Jess, that assignment was over. He'd returned to the service of Pestilence and had come back to take up the internship at Niveus Pharmaceutical that he'd won in Brady's guise. But Niveus was headquartered in Nevada, not in the Bay Area, and as Brady, her lover needed to play the part of the clean-cut, hard-working, ambitious Stanford student to the hilt. And that meant Zola couldn't go with him.

She had begged. She had pleaded. She had threatened. She had even tried to follow through on one threat by getting up early to paint a devil's trap around their bed. He'd caught her and thrown her across the room, knocking her out. When she'd come to, he was gone, and she'd been left with a broken heart—and a concussion, although that had been the easiest part to fix.

What wasn't so easy to fix, even without the heartbreak, was the wreckage of the plan, the extent of which she hadn't recognized before because of her focus on Brady. She'd lost her job at the Island of Monkey Girls, since she'd missed almost two months of work without giving notice. She was about to lose her apartment. The Winchesters had disappeared. The Adventure Club had disappeared. More importantly, _Jess_ had disappeared. And not even the best scrying and divination techniques Zola knew had given her any direction on what to do next. She didn't want to have to call Azazel to report her failure, so even though Grandpa didn't like what she was doing, she hoped he'd have a suggestion that would put her plans to become queen of the world back on track.

She was a Mongfish-Sinclair, after all. World domination was just what her family _did_. Well, maybe her stupid cousins didn't—Theo was such a ridiculous do-gooder, to say nothing of Agatha—but they hadn't been brought up within the family anyway. Grandpa wasn't keen on her being in league with a demon, but he'd approved of her ambition right from the start. Plus, now that Maman and Grand-père were dead and she couldn't reach them with her spirit board... she really didn't have anyone else to turn to. It wasn't like she had actual _friends_.

Less than a mile from Grandpa's fortress, however, she was seized by a feeling of impending doom. She nearly floored the accelerator, but when she realized that there were lights visible through the trees, she hit the brakes instead. She managed to pull over far enough that she wasn't blocking the road, but as soon as she was parked, she killed her headlights and shut off the engine. Then she got out and walked forward far enough to get a clearer view of the lights.

They were headlights.

Heart pounding, Zola left the road and made her way through the trees as quietly as she could, muttering charms to keep branches from snagging on her coat or snapping as she passed and to keep the moonlight and reflective snow from betraying her position. She finally got close enough to be able to see a glowing _green_ portal with people going in and out of it—it was too dark to see faces much, but the fact that the portal was so different from usual and stable was cause for concern—and the silhouettes of two large piles of something with people moving around them and adding something to the piles. Wood clacked against wood occasionally, and liquid splashed as one person lifted some sort of rectangular canister, like...

... like a _gas can_.

She was just about to try to move forward again to get a better look when something icy, so cold she could feel it through her coat, grabbed her arm and Grandpa's voice hissed, "Why the _hell_ didn't you tell me Sam Winchester is _fae-touched?!_ "

She turned—and there was Grandpa, furious and deathly pale, with a gaping hole in his forehead and blood on his washed-out suit jacket.

"He isn't," she gasped. "I mean, I mean, i-i-it must have happened since he left Stanford..."

"He brought something into my mansion with him, something that split into a man and a woman with weapons more powerful than anything in my entire armory. I didn't even have time to defend myself."

"Oh, _Grandpa!_ "

"They've changed the warding; they've wiped out my zoo; they've been cataloging everything. And the worst of it all is, I haven't been able to trigger the reanimation spell. I can't tell if it has something to do with the gun they shot me with—I didn't get a good look at it, so I can't tell if it might have been Colt's gun."

"But I thought Daniel Elkins—"

"I know, I know! That old coot wouldn't give up that gun for the world. And I ought to know, because that's what I offered him."

"Grandpa, what do I do?!"

"Find a way to get in there, get to my remains—"

Just then, there was a commotion, and more people came out of the portal. Two men were carrying a board with what looked like a corpse on it; they put that on the top of one of the piles and emptied two containers Zola couldn't quite see onto it. And then Klaus Wulfenbach, whom she'd seen around Palo Alto a few times, came out, supporting Barry Heterodyne, who shook hands with a couple of the other men as they approached the just-completed pile.

Grandpa swore, and Zola's stomach clenched. She'd taken her pleasure with Barry now and then, but only when he was stoned out of his gourd. He was as powerful as he was smart; he could easily have killed her if he hadn't been well under the influence. He definitely didn't look under the influence now.

"You've got to stop them," Grandpa urged. "You've got to do _something!_ "

Zola gulped and tried to gather enough power from her soul to cast a freezing spell, but she could already tell the new wards on the clearing would deflect anything she tried to throw into it. And before she could suss out a weak point, Barry drew himself up and let go of Wulfenbach, and everyone stepped well away from him and from the pile. A sudden charge in the air made Zola's hair stand on end. Then Barry's eyes blazed blue—and lightning shot down from the clear sky to strike the pile, which exploded into flame.

"Damn you, Zola," Grandpa snarled, drawing her attention away from the clearing. "This is _your_ fault! _You_ drew their attention to me!"

Zola shook her head desperately. "No, Grandpa, I swear—"

Her denial was choked off as Grandpa grabbed her by the throat. "Don't you lie to me, little girl! _Ex profundis meae animae te maledicto—_ "* But the curse turned into a scream of agony when the fire caught Grandpa's remains, and the icy grip on her throat turned white-hot as his ghost flared up and vanished.

Gasping, Zola grabbed handfuls of snow to try to cool the burns on her neck. By the time she'd recovered her wits, the second pyre was also on fire, and Wulfenbach was carrying Barry toward a truck, followed by somebody else who opened the passenger door for him. Wulfenbach put Barry in the passenger seat, closed the door, and kissed his helper and spoke to... her? for a moment. Then they kissed again, and while the helper walked back toward the pyres, Wulfenbach jogged around the front of the truck and got in the driver's seat. A moment later, Zola heard the truck start, and then it started backing up.

Zola panicked. She had to get away before they could find out she was there; even if Barry was too drained to do anything to her, Wulfenbach was scary enough in his own right. And she didn't know whether the fact that Grandpa hadn't said _what kind_ of curse he was casting made the curse any less valid.

She sprinted back to her car, used a teleportation spell to get several miles away, and fled south as far as she could before the adrenaline crash forced her to stop for the night. She needed help, but as she checked into a no-tell motel, she decided against trying to find a barfly to use as fuel for a blood phone; if she hadn't gone far enough to escape the hunters' detection, she couldn't risk having a murder draw their attention. Instead, she dug the summoning paraphernalia out of her trunk to take inside, chalked a sigil on the motel room's table, mixed the herbs, lit the candles, and called for Azazel.

"Well, howdy, Zola," Azazel drawled as he appeared. "This is a surprise."

She fell at his feet, sobbing. "He's dead, my lord! My grandfather's _dead!_ "

"... what?! Which grandfather?"

"Grandpa Magnus." Hoarse though her voice was from the attempted strangulation, she babbled the whole story in French, from the time she'd left San Francisco to the present. "And now I don't know what to do!" she concluded in a wail.

"Where are the Winchesters now?" he asked in English.

She shook her head. "I don't know," she replied in the same language. "I didn't see them, and I couldn't recognize any of the cars."

He exhaled slowly. "All right. Get up and go take off your tops; you can leave your bra on."

Sniffling, she obeyed. When she came out, he had drawn a sigil she didn't recognize on the carpet and placed the lighted candles around its edge; he was just setting the last one down on the opposite side of the circle from her.

"Okay, sweetie," he said, "step just inside the circle and turn with your back to me."

"Yes, my lord," she replied and did so.

"Now hold very still, and whatever you do, don't scream."

She squared her shoulders and opened her mouth to reply, but what came out was a gasp as a red-hot knife slashed across her lower back, severing her spinal cord and breaking her anti-possession tattoo. Then she was jerked backward to lie full length across the circle, and she felt the circle activate as her blood mingled with the chalk. Azazel chanted something in a language she didn't know... and black smoke boiled up from the ground and forced its way into her mouth, pushing her consciousness back to one corner of her being. It was like being trussed up and gagged, and not in a fun way. Worse yet, the demon recognized her... and she recognized the demon.

Azazel strolled around and crouched beside her, eyes yellow and mouth curved in a cruel smile. "Howdy, Lucrezia."

A pleased hum purred from Zola's throat. "My lord Azazel," said her no-longer-hoarse voice, but it wasn't Zola speaking.

"Settling in all right? Your first possession takes a little getting used to."

Auntie Lucrezia hummed again, stretched Zola's limbs, and accepted Azazel's help in getting up. "Yes, my lord, I think so. Mm, very nice. Not quite as nice as my daughter would have been, but..." She went toward the mirror, and Zola got a glimpse of her own face with eyes black from corner to corner as Auntie Lucrezia checked her out and ran her hands down her sides. Then Auntie Lucrezia giggled. "She even looks like dear Demonica. Oh, this is lovely."

Azazel came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. "Lucrezia, honey, I have a job for you."

"I am yours to command, my lord."

"I want you to seduce John Winchester."

"Ooooh. I will obey with pleasure. But, ah... it's been so long since I was... really human, I suppose. May I be so bold as to ask you to help me take this new model for a test drive?"

As Azazel chuckled, Zola concluded that Grandpa's curse had been effective after all.

* * *

.

* * *

* From the depths of my soul, I curse you


End file.
